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Two childhood friends discover love and manhood in the midst of strife of the
American Civil War.
What's this? A Western?
Surely Ang Lee, delicate maestro of the parlour-room conflict, is finally out
of his depth. Yet with Ride With The Devil (based on Daniel Woodrell's novel
Woe To Live On), dripping with horse sweat and ragged, furious gunplay, Lee
proves as adept at divining the mythology of America's birth pangs as he is
at creating the worlds of Taiwanese social morés, Jane Austen's corset
repression and 70s staypress familial agonies. And while not as intense or
talky as his back catalogue, Ride is every bit as groundbreaking and intelligent -
just with less wife-swapping and more horses.
Shot with the kind of cinematography that loosens Oscar cabinets, and populated
with a cast of less familiar hip young things, this is a masterwork, melding
internal conflict with external drama and vivid, sprawling action pieces that
the likes of Eastwood, Ford or even Peckinpah would tip their hats toward. Put
oversimply, it follows the rites-of-passage of young Jake Roedel (the auspicious
Maguire), who ignores his Unionist father and elects to follow his best friend
Jack Bull Chiles (Ulrich) and his own beliefs into the Confederacy - and a brutal
war that will finally render any ideology pointless. Set (and accurately made)
on the Missouri/Kansas border, a stunningly lush Brit-like landscape of farms
and dense woodland, it is a long way from the military manoeuvres of the Greys
and the Blues. Tapping into a Vietnam-esque war of attrition, the friends join a
callous band of killers (including a beardy James Caviezel and a psychotic
Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) and endure a conflict of guerrilla tactics and deception
between the Southernist Bushwackers and Yankee Jayhawkers, which allows Lee
to try his hand at brutal shoot-outs and, in one huge opera of violence, re-enact
a real-life mass slaughter, as a rag-tag Confederate army reduce the town of
Lawrence, Kansas, to rubble.
This is also, of course, an Ang Lee movie - a grandiose Western concerned
with human relationships. Jewel makes a polished and attractive debut as the
love interest of both friends; far from a clichéd love triangle, her
maddening attempts to woo a resolutely bachelor Jake are among the film's most
touching moments. Jeffrey Wright (who shone in 1996's Basquiat) is an even
more complex character, a slave conversely fighting for the South and the cause
of slavery, whose strange yet devoted friendship to Jake is a pivotal feature.
James Schamus' politically astute script is at pains to consider the mindset
of the Southern fighters, painting a realistic vision of men fighting for
family and land, and not simply a bunch of racist Dixie baddies. And even
within this highly-charged drama, Lee succeeds in adding humour to the range
and colour of emotions he evokes from his material, slipping in the gentle
laughs inherent in the absurdity of their situation. He even manages his
trademark lavish mealtime motif.
Ride falls narrowly short of five-star glory, care of its occasional loss of
narrative focus, and fails to truly get into the hearts and minds of some of
the characters - chiefly Ulrich's frustratingly vague Jack Bull and Rhys-Meyers'
overblown nutcase - but these are just irritants, not flaws. Ang Lee's
sweeping romantic Civil War adventure clips the bar of masterpiece and remains
a magisterial movie experience
IAN NATHAN
[Four Stars]
THE KNOWLEDGE
The levelling of Lawrence, Kansas, on August 21, 1863, is the largest recorded
mass murder in American history, with over 150 men and boys slaughtered.
The guerrilla faction of the Confederates were known as Bushwackers, simply
because they hid out in the dense bushes of Missouri
It is a recorded truth that many slaves perversely fought for the South, driven
by loyalty to their masters, the need to prove they were equal or simply as a
relief from the drudgery of slave life.
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