Starring:Stephen Lang, Jeff Daniels, Robert Duvall

The Civil War was fought in a thousand different places for a thousand different reasons. There’s a movie for almost all of them.

And now, there’s “Gods and Generals,” a three-and-a-half hour antebellum epic that attempts to do it all in one fell swoop. Admirable. For filmgoers such as myself, a self-ordained Civil War buff who spends summer days reenacting and nights voraciously reading books and watching films, it’s an event of magnificent proportions.

Advertisement

I anticipated this movie like no other this year.

As a result, I’m not sure if my end impressions of the film are objective or a simple case of post-partum depression. “Gods and Generals” is, to be sure, a magnificently crafted epic that never sacrifices detail in its pursuit of the ultimate Civil War movie. Unfortunately, this becomes a double-edged blade in the end.

Clocking in at just under a sprawling four hours, “Gods and Generals” covers a lot of ground, probably too much ground. From the very start, it seems like an epic made simply for the sake of being an epic, not an exciting movie such as “Gettysburg” that just turns out being long. This one hops around too much. Its characters never flesh into more than historical archetypes. And in trying to focus on such a large topic and bring empathy to it all, director Ronald Maxwell (“Gettysburg”) creates a film that doesn’t succeed in focusing well on anything.

The foundation of the movie, the first chapter in a trilogy that includes “Gettysburg” and the forthcoming “The Last Full Measure,” is the legendary Southern General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson (Stephen Lang, who played George Pickett in “Gettysburg”). Jackson, an eccentric and religious man who made himself a genius on the battlefield, was a central part of the Confederate military team that almost led the South to victory during the first two years of the war. It’s those exploits that are portrayed here.

Along with Jackson rides the legendary Robert E. Lee (Robert Duvall, portraying one of his own relatives), General James Longstreet (Bruce Boxleitner) and even a cameo from producer Ted Turner. On the federal side, Jeff Daniels reprises his “Gettysburg” role as Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, C. Thomas Howell returns as his brother, Tom, and Brian Mallon also comes back as General Winfield Scott Hancock.

Together, these men find themselves caught up in three critical battles around which the film is centered:Bull Run, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. In between the battles, they’re left to pontificate, in true Cliff’s Notes style, on the causes, dramas and ideologies that spurred the war, most of all what role God plays in the whole affair. Some of it is exciting. Most of it is tedious. Almost all the dialogue feels pulled from a historical document, and most of it is spoken with the same kind of enthusiasm.

The battles that tie it all together can be equally wooden. While occasionally impressive, these odes to re-enactors tend to become confusing, even to someone well read on the subject, and the PG-13 rating only serves to make them bloodless and sterile. By the time “Gods and Generals” steers into hour three (thankfully, there is an intermission), it’s almost a chore to keep up with it; by this point, it’s obvious that there will be no real characterization of these people beyond that of historical icons. It’s simply an exercise in superficially canonizing the war.

Advertisement*

Not everything is bad. Lang is compelling in the role of Jackson, but it’s unfortunate that director Maxwell doesn’t give him the reins until after intermission. Daniels, whose role formed the emotional core of the flawed masterpiece “Gettysburg,” gives the same impassioned performance here but is allotted little screen time. Same goes for Duvall. He’s convincing beyond a doubt as Lee, but we never get enough of him. The rest of the cast is made up mostly of afterthoughts (there are more than 150 speaking roles), and some of them, most notably the women and blacks, are so ludicrously portrayed that it’s laughable.

“Gods and Generals” isn’t really a movie. It’s a glossed-up version of a history book that never really finds itself, its characters or what kind of a story it wants to tell. What a shame. The Civil War was a pivotal junction in American history that made everything before it a mere prologue. It took lives, changed lives, destroyed lives and redefined lives.

In all its pomp and circumstance, “Gods and Generals” never gets around to telling that story. And, as a result, there’s no story here that ends up meaning anything.