I Was Praying for Intermission, Myself
It doesn’t really bother me so much that the 2003 film Gods and Generals portrays Stonewall Jackson as a bit of a hyper-religious crank because, you know, he was.
What bothers me is that the film portrays this as a good thing.
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Ohhh, I caught this movie at the theaters at the tail end of my “Lost Causer” days and even then I thought the movie was overacted and would serve as a tool for Lost Causer justification. I’m feeling much better these days, however.
Gods and Generals hits virtually every Lost Causer hot button, including Black Confederates. But that’s a post for another day. . . .
This could have been a great movie IF…they had done it as a biopic on Jackson or on the early years of the war, but they tried to do too much in one movie.
Snark aside, there’s a lot of good in Gods and Generals. There’s obviously tremendous effort spent in getting small details right. (I especially like the recreation of First Manassas, where every regiment takes the field in a different uniform, including some who look like retreads from a Colonial Williamsburg open audition call.) But the movie doesn’t add up to the sum of its details. It plays like a John Paul Strain painting, everything precise, but too posed, too stylized, far too full of treacly, sentimental ooze, and entirely two-dimensional.