(2003) From about the second grade when I watched The Gray Ghost on TV, I've had a fascination for the American Civil War, reading and collecting hundreds of books on the War Between the States. When I wasn't play baseball or re-enacting a battle with my brothers and friends, I was in a library poring over detailed histories and biographies from the rare-books collection. As a preadolescent I even started compiling a list intended to name every soldier and sailor who served on the Union side, giving up when I realized my unalphabetized enumeration of some 25,000 persons, including units and remarks, lacked coherence for the enormous task. However, there is a book (title of which I've forgotten) in which every known general of both the Union and the Confederacy is recorded with a brief biography of each officer.

Director/producer Ron Maxwell's epic (3 hours 49 minutes), illuminating account of the war, based on Jeff Shaara's novel, The Killer Angels - from just after the attack on Fort Sumter (April 12, 1861), as Francis Preston Blair, acting on behalf of the newly inaugurated President Lincoln, offers Colonel Robert E. Lee (Robert Duvall) command of the Union Army, who declines preceding his beloved Virginia's decision to secede (accepting by "will of God and aiding conscience" command of the Citizen Army of Virginia), until the battle of Chancellorsville, costing the Confederacy one of its greatest generals, in May 1863 - largely features the personage of Thomas Jonathan Jackson (Stephen Lang), who received the moniker "Stonewall" for his courageous refusal to take cover (wounded in his left hand) during the first major battle of the war at Manassas Junction.

(The North often referred to a battle according to a geographical feature, such as Bull Run Creek, while the South named the engagement after a populated location, thus the battle of Manassas or Bull Run. Afterward Jackson's second wife Anna, with whom he hopes to have a child following the death of his first wife and infant during childbirth, reminds him that the battle will help him remember her birthday since both occurred on the same day. The film does not indicate that people of polite society came down to picnic from Washington in anticipation watching an entertainment of the rebels being routed; instead, they were made witnesses to the horror of defeat preceding their own frightened retreat.)

At the outbreak of hostilities, Jackson had been a major in the US Army teaching at the Virginia Military Institute, who, though believing "War is the sum of all evil," like Lee chooses to defend his state against Lincoln's "bellicose persuasion" - citing his hierarchy of loyalties beginning with God, then Virginia, then country.

The looming threat of war divides families, with a father fearing this will be the start of 100 generations of hatred like the bloody feuds of Europe. The first of an intended trilogy of films, involving thousands of military and civilian re-enactors, dramatizes in documentary fashion the divisive conflict over dissolution of the Union - vignettes of events making it simultaneously personal and historical, occasionally didactic - that took place in Virginia over the first two years preceding Gettysburg, exhaustively attentive to details, including uniforms (Southerners wore a motley assortment of garb from gray to blue to butternut to red while the Union soldiers' uniforms were more uniformly blue), weapons, battlefield tactics; we hear the generals discussing strategy and giving orders for the deployment of troops.

Yet as Gen Lee says to his assembled commanders - among them generals Jackson, James Longstreet, and J.E.B. Stuart - after considering all the military options available, "The rest is in God's hands," the unexpected and accidental cannot be ignored. Scripture plays a significant role in the thoughts and expressions of the various characters; a Confederate artillery officer says he's named his cannons after the New Testament canons to spread the gospel.

The Union side is personified by philosophy professor Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels) from Bowdoin College in Maine, who leaves his wife Fanny for the mistress of war, commissioned as a colonel in the 20th Maine Regiment, joined by his younger brother Tom. As opposed to his Southern foes' reliance on Biblical passages for moral support, Lawrence prefers quoting from Latin historians' commentaries of Caesar's military campaigns.

Initially black slaves are portrayed as being loyal and affectionate toward their considerate masters: Martha protects the Beales' home from Yankees invading Fredericksburg; Gen Lee favors freedom for any Negro who enlists to defend the Confederate cause; Jackson commiserates with his Negro cook, Jim Lewis, when the black man speaks of his "brothers in bondage," expressing his own belief that a South freed from the tyranny of the North in this second war of independence will free its slaves.

By December 1862 the Union Army, led by another cautious commander, General Ambrose Burnside (sideburns were named after him), who dismisses Gen Winfield Scott Hancock's more aggressive recommendations, in allowing the Confederates to fortify their positions across the Rappahannock River above Fredericksburg, finally attempts an assault on Marye's Heights with disastrous results as the rebels repel repeated attacks. Fighting on both sides, Irishmen slaughter one another over a field where corn had been grown to feed those starving in Ireland during the famine. Col Chamberlain and his men employ corpses of their comrades as protection from the volleys of musket fire.

Gen Lee comments: "It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should be too fond of it."

When the Beales' house becomes a hospital for wounded US soldiers, Martha finally admits: "I wants to die free." A domestic scene has Lee, Jackson, and others of the general's staff spending Christmas in the home the Corbins at Moss Neck Manor where Jackson develops a fatherly affection for young Jane as a surrogate daughter; back on the frontline Johnny Reb and Billy Yank call a temporary truce to meet halfway across the river to exchange coffee and tobacco. Col Chamberlain's letters to his wife make no mention of the massacre he's been through.

In January, President Lincoln publishes his Emancipation Proclamation, shifting the Union's argument from a political dispute over states' rights with the southern states to a moral condemnation of slavery; critical of his brother's hypocrisy of referring to "darkies," Col Chamberlain launches a lecture: "War is a scourge, but so is slavery." Gen Jackson rationalizes that if the Republicans up north lose the war, they'll lose the next election and return to their homes with war profits; but if the Virginians and their fellow secessionists are defeated, they will have lost their country.

In The Wilderness campaign in May 1863, uncertain of the Union Army's intentions under Gen Joseph Hooker, having twice as many men as his rebel forces, Gen Lee sends Gen Jackson on a stealth mission to surprise the enemy. Routing the enemy, Jackson orders Gen A.P. Hill to press on even as dusk descends: "We will cut them off, General!" But in the dark, Jackson and his staff finding themselves beyond their lines, are mistaken by their own men in the confusion of entanglements and fired upon. Grievously wounded in the left shoulder and hand, Stonewall Jackson is taken to the surgeon.

Hearing of Stonewall's condition, Gen Lee says: "He's lost his left arm; I've lost my right." Though his wounds begin to heal, Jackson's lungs become infected with pneumonia from which he's the "infinite gainer to be translated" to his Maker.

After this movie's poor performance at the box office (but don't let that put you off from watching this spectacular cinema), Ted Turner declined to finance The Last Full Measure, the final film of the trilogy; thus it awaits someone else's backing for production.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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