Ang Lee's civil war epic, 'Ride with the Devil', is a handsome film, and I don't necessarily mean this in a good way: it's a movie in which good looking young Southerners, prone to making fine southern speeches, move through a world dotted with gorgeous, well-built southern houses - even when the central characters hole up underground their shelter has a surprisingly solid feel. The squalor of the civil war is not much in evidence here - the story follows a group of post-war marauders, so there are no massed battle scenes - and nor is the politics, in a simple tale of people defending their land. The pro-confederacy heroes are made sympathetic by their unprejudiced friendship with a (saintly) black man, and while there's a small hint that this is not universally popular among their compadres, there's no real acknowledgement of the fact that their cause is an extension of the fight for slavery or that the resistance, within a few years, morphed into the Ku Klux Klan. Tobey Maguire, in the lead role, struggles to give it the gravitas it needs, while the plot expects us to believe he kills fifteen men while remaining completely sexually innocent. But the strangest part of the script is the way that it jumps over the crucial transition in this character's life, from good-hearted farm boy to cold-blooded killer. The story effectively tells of his re-humanisation; but the failure to properly chart his prior revolt means that those fifteen bodies remain an aberrant item on his C.V., not fully consistent with the portrayal we are shown. This is not an awful film, and although long, I found time passed quite quickly when watching it; but for such a long movie, and one with such a weighty subject matter, I was a little disappointed with how little it actually has to say.
Review of Ride with the Devil
