Ang Lee's civil Civil War
by Ray Pride
Ang Lee may be our decade's Howard Hawks, a versatile stylist willing to tackle a dozen kinds of stories.
Lee has described his film in production, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," as "'Sense and Sensibility' with martial arts," and his cross-cultural eclecticism charms in all his work. His screenwriter-producer James Schamus is an important part of the team that allows him to leap across cultures and time. Their latest, "Ride with The Devil," is almost imperturbable, a serene and confident examination of how men die, grow or find their voices through challenge. The ragtag crew of "true Missouri men" forced into retreat from their frontier lives are pale, peaked, long-haired irregulars who must shed blood to earn dignity. Among them are Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire, a model observer and remarkable presence), Jack Bull (a boisterous Skeet Ulrich), and as a slave whose freedom was bought by his now-best friend, the remarkable Jeffrey Wright. (Jewel, as a love interest, comes off well, a shyly-smiling daguerreotype.) Maguire's face is both stalwart yet goofy throughout, a German-born boy of 18 whose sympathies shift away from the traditions of the Old South over the course of the movie.
The bursts of violence are as ravaging as those in any post-Apocalypse film. The young cast fight battles mostly forgotten outside the south, yet Lee's work is immediate and sensuous, such as in the fearful gust of faceless horsemen thundering in the black night: sound, a blur of motion, gunfire. Lee and Schamus suggest that hand-to-hand, neighbor-to-neighbor warfare that the United States has not seen for almost a century and a half remains eminently relevant today. Boys see their fathers killed. Blood oaths are sworn over spilled blood. But wisdom, if hard-won, remains simple: "It ain't right and it ain't wrong: it just is," one weary lad recalls.
As Schamus writes in the introduction to the published screenplay (Faber & Faber), "It is... an entertainment, a myth for sale." Of this myth and its mouthfuls of authentic colloquialism, I wonder why he and Lee sought metaphorical subjects at a remove from their own lives. The garrulous Schamus offers, "It's two things. It's how to create a situation, where you're establishing a cinematic empathy for characters that's not based on any kind of AT&T ad formula. That's getting into the characters' heads, identifying with the emotions, but that does it in a more—here's where the abstract word comes in—in an epistemological way. Trying to get into their world so that the knowledge they have feels like the knowledge you're going to have. Language plays a big role in that."
When Jake finds out a man he's let go has killed his father, Jack Bull has a line, "You taught him mercy but he forgot the lesson." "I spent a lot of time figuring how far we could go with language," Schamus says. "In terms of the connection/distance matrix in the movie, the Civil War embodies the tension between those two things. It was the first major conflagration in history in which the majority of the combatants knew how to read and write. The guys are killing each other were capable of expressing themselves in written language. At the same time, it was the last major war in which these combatants could actually write down their thoughts and feelings in epistolary form and send the letters off without being censored. Letters played a huge part in the movie for that reason. There's again a sense of distance, linguistically, through the letters, which are from someone who is absent, to someone else. The world of the movie, both linguistic and emotional, is a lot about those things."
The most marvelous invention is Jeffrey Wright's Daniel Holt, played like an old man who has seen it all, yet he's a young man who doesn't speak until late into the story. "Honestly, I just hope the film does well enough so that he'll get his nomination," Schamus says. "Anything else is fine, whatever, but heart and soul, I think this is the guy. I think he is one of the greatest actors of his generation, period, and there aren't that many roles out there. It's tough. He does the impossible, which we put in the script. He starts as a character who is wallpaper. This guy doesn't exist. Slowly he brings himself to language, to speech, to himself, and to, finally, his destiny. At the end, it's him and that landscape with a gun."
While the movie is filled with stirring images, the savory dialogue resounds in memory. "The guilty pleasure of writing this script," Schamus says, laughing, "was I just ripped off the dialogue from the book. The first draft, all I did was transcribe [novelist] Daniel Woodrell's dialogue and, as they say, bill the studio for it. Then they call me a screenwriter!"
Still, writing the ring of old-fashioned southern speech, must have had its challenges. "I realized that the book, which is in first person, is filled with these beautiful American languages. I realized the continuum of language and voice, including the violence the book depicted, was embedded in the beauty of the language. They're saying these wonderful things and the next minute, they're blowing each other's heads off and blood is splattering. We had to figure out a way to balance those things, to have the storytelling and language working together, and not apart from each other."
"Ride with the Devil" opens Friday.
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.