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Ang Lee's monumentally impressive new movie breaks the mould of all other movies about the American Civil War. This is war as seen between the lines. It's war not as fought by the professionals, but by the guerrillas - by the teenage sons of farmers, landowners, tradesmen who became "men" overnight, pulled into the dreadful fraternal conflict on the Southern side and going to ground - sometimes literally underground - in the Missouri bush, whence they sallied out on raids that hit the manpower and morale of the Union forces.
These "bushwhackers" and their running-dog existence, dressed in colourful mufti, learning the skills of the kill through seeing the merciless pogrom perpetrated on their own kith and kin, are fearsomely well portrayed by a young cast who have never acted so well, or with such humility and, in most cases, humanity.
They live and talk and die in period. They address each other with the formalities common even among unlettered folk of those times.
Unwashed, bearded or stubbled, with hair whose length on a young head was not to be seen again until the hippy era, they nevertheless practise the courtesies of their sex towards the women in their milieu - women who become overnight widows - in scenes that recall, as they're meant to, the horrors of later civil wars beyond America, on the Asian and European continents.
Virtual schoolboys, they learned to take life even before they lost their virginity.
Toward the end of the film, Toby Maguire, playing a kid annealed by battle, marries a young widow (played by singer-composer Jewel) in an amusing reversal of a shotgun wedding, and then proceeds, as usual, to spread his bedroll with his comrades-in-arms, until he's instructed that his place is now in his wife's bed.
Ang Lee, who directed Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm, shows himself once more a master of social nuance, class, rank and historical insight in a land and period far from his own. Without effort, he focuses on the minor moments of momentous events: the campfire men reading out a bagful of intercepted letters and using the senders' sentiments to fill the emotional blanks in their own home thoughts; the liberated slave (Jeffrey Wright) who fights on the side of the South out of friendship until he finally, quietly and peaceably, appreciates the future of his race lies with the North; the loyalty that turns into blood lust that enables killers to masquerade as patriots; the dreadful casual suddenness of death coming to people in a single senseless executioner's shot as they milk a cow or hang a shirt on a clothes line.
Lee's movie will be compared to John Huston's version of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. But really, it's a different war, a different killing field he reports on. There's a terrifying scene - great because of the fearful way it illustrates courage being deliberately perverted into vengeance by horseback demagoguery - when a Southern militiaman, name of Quantrill (John Ales), harangues the bushwhackers into avenging his own shameful defeat. He leads them on a raid on the defenceless hamlet of Lawrence to sack, rape and murder.
The film's editing prevents the camera ever lingering in bloodlustful detail on scenes of the utmost grimness: but the swiftness of massacre, its heartlessness and randomness, is all but unbearable. Kosovo and Chechnya are more than a century ahead, but present in the fever of slaughter.
Ride With the Devil is one of the very, very few films you feel gets every social, historical and military detail dead right but without impeding the human flow of emotion through the sinews and veins of its characters. It is quite simply the best film to reach us from America this year.
Alexander Walker
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Evening Standard Web site
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