THE KEEPING ROOM (2014)

Daniel Barber's Civil War picture is a misanthropic piece of work in the most literal sense. Julia Hart's screenplay effectively declares war on men, uniting mistress and slave at the tail end of the war in resistance to rape and pillage by Union soldiers. Sisters Augusta (Britt Marling) and Louise (Hailee Steinfeld) and a sole slave, Mad (Muna Otaru) are all that's left on the family farm as the Confederacy faces its reckoning. Like Scarlett O'Hara and her sisters, Augusta and Louise have to work in the fields alongside Mad in order to survive on humble crops. Louise is still spoiled enough to protest, asking why "the nigger" can't be left to do all the work. As Augusta explains, "It's like I said, we're all niggers now." You get the sense that she doesn't just mean herself and her sister, but says this in the spirit of the John Lennon/Yoko Ono song, "Woman is the Nigger of the World."

We're well past the legend of Sherman's March as a bloodless ravaging by this point in history. In its place, Keeping Room shows free-ranging Union foragers (led by Sam Worthington) committing random atrocities as they close in on our heroines' farm. Once they arrive, the film becomes something like a feminist version of Straw Dogs as the women fight off the blue bellies, though not before Louise, barely recovered from a raccoon bite, is raped. Add to this terror images like horses hauling a burning coach and its dead driver, or Augusta's discovery of a friend's pasty corpse, and Keeping Room seems to be a horror movie first and foremost.

The screenplay may insist too much that gender trumps race. It seems too good, if that's really the word, to be true that Mad forgives Augusta for shooting her returned lover in the back, mistaking him for another intruder. It's true enough that Mad was ready to shoot the same man in the back until he turned to reveal himself to her, but by this point in the film, long after Augusta and Mad had exchanged angry slaps, writer and director apparently have decided that race is no longer an issue. Instead, they have Mad recall the repeated rapes she suffered while still a girl in a mysterious plantation shed. On top of that, they have Augusta execute a wounded forager who had effectively surrendered, as if she was obliged to show him no mercy after killing the other man. In a grim parody of the end of Glory the dead forager and the dead freedman are dumped into a common grave, though Mad offers a dubious Augusta a spiritual assurance that the more innocent of the two is not really in the same place as the other.

In a final irony, as the main army advances on the farm, the only way the women can escape from the house of war is to become men by stripping the uniforms from the soldiers they've killed. You could argue that they've already surrendered much of their femininity, by the standards of their own time, by becoming killers, but the real message of this coda is more likely that there's no place for women in a world of men at war, so women must transform in one way or other in order to survive. It should be a happy ending since it looks like their plan will work, as long as they remain those few steps ahead of the soldiers swarming over the farm in the final shot, but at the same time it's an act of surrender -- just not the fall of the slave-plantation world we'd expect to celebrate. The Confederacy is dead, but injustice persists -- and the Confederacy's conquerors are perpetrating it. The Keeping Room may overstate its main point at times, but it's still an honestly unsettling movie about two civil wars: the one we see ending, and one that many say goes on today.

On the Big Screen: FREE STATE OF JONES (2016)

Gary Ross's film presents Newton Knight as an American Robin Hood, a folk hero Americans should have known better. It leaves you wondering why his story and the legend of the Free State of Jones wasn't the stuff of Hollywood movies (George Marshall's 1948 film Tap Roots is based on a names-changed fictionalization of the story) or Wonderful World of Disney adventures, though the film itself, in its downbeat final act, hints at an answer. The Robin Hood tropes of the first half serve to set us up for the sucker-punch history lesson to come, creating a powerful effect of a dream destroyed. Like many a Robin Hood story, this one opens with the hero involved in a futile war. Knight (Matthew McConaughey) is a hospital orderly in the Confederate army who grows increasingly disgruntled with the Cause. He resents a new law that allows soldiers who own 20 or more slaves to go home. Worse, a young relative is basically impressed into service and promptly gets killed despite Newton's efforts to protect him. Allowed to bring the boy's body home, Knight decides not to return. That makes him an outlaw already, but when he prevents the rebel home guard from confiscating a family's livestock Knight becomes a fugitive. His Sherwood Forest is a swamp occupied by runaway slaves, with Rachel, a local house slave (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) -- seemingly privileged but actually the master's sex slave -- his link to the outside world, while Newton becomes Rachel's link to the world of words and books. With Knight's wife (Keri Russell) forced to flee from Confederate reprisals, Rachel becomes Knight's lover. To mix metaphors, Mbatha-Raw is the hero's Rebecca to Russell's Rowena, but Ivanhoe itself is a Robin Hood story. As an increasingly desperate situation forces the Confederacy to grow more invasive and confiscatory -- the opposite in its intrusiveness to the idealized regime of enduring states-rights fantasies -- the swamp becomes a magnet for white deserters as Knight welds deserters and runaways into a guerrilla force that repeatedly thwarts the Sheriff -- I mean the home guard -- while remaining impregnable on their home ground. Knight's army eventually liberates five counties in Mississippi, initially offering themselves to the Union but finally declaring the Free State in response to General Sherman's indifference. Finally forced to retreat to the swamp by superior Rebel numbers, they remain undefeated at the end of the war and the liberation of the slaves.

As writer and director, Ross sees the Rebellion as the proverbial rich man's war and poor man's fight. Many in the North saw the Union cause in the same way, but the Confederacy as portrayed in Free State seems incomparably more predatory than the Lincoln administration that some see today as the precursor of Big Government. The predicament of poor whites in Mississippi seems to prove the point made by contemporary critics of the Slave Power, that its aggressive defense of privilege would ultimately subvert small-r republican government. Newton Knight becomes conscious of a Rebel exploitation of poor whites that is little different from the planters' exploitation of slaves. It's arguably worse, as Knight points out to one deserter reluctant to consort with blacks, because the planters don't order their slaves to get shot. Who, then, is the nigger? The most shocking, and probably most memorable line in the picture is Newton's assertion that everyone is someone else's nigger at some point. What seems implicit, given the story of the film, is that this is so so long as inequality persists, that the rich inevitably will make everyone their niggers if they need to. The extremity of war finally awakens the poor whites of Jones County to this truth and encourages collaboration, if not true fellow-feeling, with the ex-slaves. The tragedy of the story is that this glimmering of solidarity dies during Reconstruction, apparently because the poor whites no longer feel under the gun and no longer blame the planters for their plight. If anything the film understates this by making Knight's defeat by the Ku Klux Klan so nearly complete, when in fact he led a military force against the hooded terrorists. Knight himself remains a literal negro-lover to an extent that would seem too good to be true if history didn't confirm it.

Free State of Jones is a film that rewards patient viewing. It does something strange about a half hour into the picture, flashing forward to the late 1940s, when Newton Knight's great-grandson is tried for violating Mississippi's anti-miscegenation laws for marrying a white woman while his own blood is tainted with Rachel's. As the film returns repeatedly to this trial, which hinges on whether Rachel can be proven to have been the latter Knight's ancestor, its relevance to the main story remains questionable. Presumably the main story of Rachel and Newton Knight will prove whether Newton's descendant has Negro blood, but confirmation of this in the past can only be bad news for the 20th century Knight. The last half-hour of the picture explains why it's bad news. Newton Knight's defeat in the 1870s makes possible the persecution of his descendant three generations later. A textual assurance that Newton and Rachel personally had a happy ending -- the film goes so far as to suggest that Rachel and Newton's ex became friends -- does little to ameliorate a sense of disappointment that the filmmakers clearly and bravely want to instill in their audience after the exhilarating action of the Civil War section. In the end, after introducing us to a real-life folkloric hero, Free State indicts us as a nation for failing to live up to Newton Knight's heroism and idealism, thus condemning ourselves to another century of racial oppression. I don't know if the country wants to hear such a message this year, or whether this film will be denounced for political correctness, but we can definitely stand to hear that message, especially from a film that succeeds as either an action film or a history lesson.

Afterthought: That ego-trip of a poster doesn't help the film any. Make no mistake: McConaughey is great as Newton Knight, but the advertising ought to be selling Free State as an epic adventure, not spooking them with the specter of a wild-eyed fanatic for who knows what cause. If the picture doesn't get the grosses it deserves, you can partly blame that image that looks more like a wanted poster than a movie poster.

DVR Diary: THE GREAT LOCOMOTIVE CHASE (1956)

Walt Disney was a notorious political reactionary, but at least he knew which side was the right side in the Civil War. By comparison, Buster Keaton, who made arguably the greatest film set in the Civil War, once said it was hard to make the Union the good guys in that setting. His thinking seems to have been that the Confederacy was the archetypal underdog battling gallantly against overwhelming force, and that no one wants to root for the overwhelming force. In Keaton's defense, The General is no brief for the Confederacy; you root for Buster as the Reb hero because he's one guy against overwhelming odds, not out of any belief in states' rights or the goodness of slavery. Disney's Great Locomotive Chase, directed by Oscar-winning editor Francis D. Lyon and a product of an era when "Disney live-action film" meant "cool adventure movie" rather than "tasteless pabulum for the whole family," is a mirror-universe version of The General, based on the same historical events but choosing the Union men who stole the train known as The General as its heroes. While Walt's heart was in the right place, it's still a strange decision because Lyon ended up making a film about failure. This time we see that the Union team led by James J. Andrews (Fess Parker) went up against overwhelming odds themselves, and lost.

It must have been a worrisome film for Parker, Disney's Davy Crockett, to make so soon after seeming to become a superstar, because it must have seemed as if Disney was typecasting him as a doomed hero. More worrisome still may have been the way Jeffery Hunter, in effect playing the Keaton role, not only steals the train back but quite nearly steals the film from Parker, as if to prove that Keaton's choice of hero was more dramatically correct if not politically correct. Using the character's real name, William Fuller, rather than Keaton's Johnnie Gray, Hunter plays it straight and more realistic, yet with some of Keaton's indomitable determination. Keaton was making a comedy that is also arguably the first action movie as we understand the concept today, and it was important in both respects that he retake his train alone. As Fuller, Hunter has help every step of the way, but is the indisputable leader and motivator of his little band. He's at his most Keatonesque early on in the chase, when he initially, madly goes after the General on foot until he and the men trailing behind him find a handcar. The film as a whole is often Keatonesque in its commitment to authenticity -- Disney sent Lyon down to the actual historic locations in Georgia -- and an aversion to fakery for the most part. The history simply lends itself to a certain epic manner of filmmaking, but while Keaton made it into a comic epic Disney, Lyon and screenwriter Lawrence Edward Watkin made a thriller undermined by that same history, lurching from suspense to suspense as the Union team is nearly exposed or fails yet again to thwart Fuller's pursuit, until it succumbs to cumulative anticlimax, while Keaton used the actual events as a springboard for advanced slapstick.

Shackling themselves to history, the Disney team must give up the locomotive chase with something like a half-hour left in the picture. We're set up to expect a desperate escape back to Union lines, but Parker's whole gang is promptly captured -- most of them, including Parker himself, offscreen. The film then builds toward a mass prison break that serves only to resolve the character arc of a supporting player -- Jeff York apparently was cast in this role because he'd been Mike Fink to Parker's Crockett -- and while the idea is for Andrews and the other guy to give the others time to flee, most of them -- though not the relatively dull fellow who narrates the story and receives one of the first Medals of Honor -- are rounded up offscreen and herded back to prison to be hanged. It was all worthwhile, we're told at the end, because it diverted Confederate troops to railroad guard duty, but the film leaves you with not so much an appreciation of heroic sacrifice as pity for Andrews and the other losers. The film's self-defeating quality, its many pictorial virtues notwithstanding, leave you wondering whether Disney, eager as a train enthusiast to make a film about the chase, felt he couldn't make Fuller the hero because he thought Keaton might have been able to sue. In the end, historical accuracy is the only advantage Great Locomotive Chase has over The General. The later film can't help but look like a rough draft of the former, despite Technicolor and Cinemascope, in part because Keaton was so far ahead of his time as an action filmmaker but also because, thirty years before Disney, he had already remade tragedy as farce.

On the Big Screen: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (Il buono, il bruto, il cattivo, 1966)

In this world there are two kinds of antiwar movies: pacifist movies, and Sergio Leone's epic conclusion to his Clint Eastwood "Dollars" trilogy, which is no less antiwar for its reveling in man-to-man gunplay. There are moments in its three hours when each of the principal characters -- not just Eastwood's "Good" gunman and the late Eli Wallach's immortal Tuco, but also Lee Van Cleef's villain Angel Eyes -- registers dismay or disgust at the scale of destruction and carnage generated by the American Civil War. The U.S. advertising claimed that the War was just "practice" for these three, but the characters themselves might disagree. They are all violent, ruthless and greedy men, but war is beyond their comprehension. They see no point to it. Personal gain is the only justification for killing they can imagine. Tuco brags that he has a $3,000 price on his head and speculates that the Union Army "didn't even pay you a dollar" for a soldier's amputated arm. In this respect the Good (a con man who abandons his partner in the desert after calculating diminishing returns) isn't very different from the nearly amoral heroes of American westerns, not to mention some American war movies, but the typical American story has the hero redeem himself by making a larger cause his own. Joining the war completes a moral awakening in these cases. In the Leone film Tuco and Blondie (Eastwood) intervene in the war only to get it out of their way. If they can blow up a much fought-over bridge, the contending armies will disappear so they can cross the river unchallenged. On Blondie's part, if not on Tuco's, the gesture is also something of an act of compassion toward the drunken captain who had befriended them before getting mortally wounded and had fantasized about blowing the bridge despite orders to capture it intact. What makes Blondie the "Good," I suppose is this awakening of compassion, which extends to another mortally wounded soldier to whom he offers his coat and cheroot. Significantly, Blondie finds a serape near this victim and takes it for himself, transforming himself into the Man With No Name we remember from the previous Leone films. But Blondie's compassion extends only to those who have to fight for no good reason, as far as he can see. There is no sharing the treasure of the stolen payroll with Angel Eyes; Blondie will "earn" it by killing the Bad one -- who perhaps best displays his Badness through his easy infiltration of the Army as a prison officer waiting for the mysterious Bill Carson to fall into his lap. And while Blondie ultimately does share with Tuco, he can't resist teasing his sometime-partner in their typically vicious fashion, leaving him with only a wobbly tombstone standing between him and a hanging until the Good one reminds the Ugly of his marksmanship, shooting the rope apart in time for old time's sake. Maybe what makes the Good good is that he'll kill only with "good" reason -- the sort of reason a state can't have. The message to the rest of us might be: kill, or risk your life, only if you get something out of it.

This may be the ultimate statement of the amorality often thought to define spaghetti westerns. Leone himself would move on to a straightforward revenge story with an unambiguous hero, and then to a "Zapata" western with nearly the opposite message from GB&U, focusing on the radicalization of a Tuco-like bandit and his adoption of a higher cause. It may be significant that Duck You Sucker is easily Leone's worst western, that he was following the politicization of the genre (at least when set in Mexico) without really feeling it. He seems more comfortable with the scale of GB&U, in which the protagonists resist politicization and the petty feud between Blondie and Tuco so fascinates him that more than an hour goes by before the plot of the picture really gets going. This is where Leone begins messing with audiences by slowing things down. Angel Eyes's early visit with a doomed soldier, when he sits down to share the man's dinner and we see him devour every spoonful, is in the director's protracted "Once Upon a Time" mode. At other points, most notably Tuco's famous race through the cemetery, Leone seems to stretch the scene to suit Ennio Morricone's music. Either way, length creates atmosphere and manipulates mood. If there's an objective standard to apply, GB&U is really too long, especially with the restored scenes redubbed by an elderly Eastwood and Wallach and a bad Van Cleef impersonator. But maybe you can't cut footage (apart from what had been cut for the initial U.S. release) without cutting from the film's distinctive character.

More than Leone's masterpiece, this is Eli Wallach's monument. With Eastwood trapped in the Good role (and unable yet to act his way out of the trap) and Van Cleef much diminished from his star-making turn in Leone's previous film, GB&U is Tuco's show. What makes Tuco Ugly, apart from his obvious physical shortcomings? Why is he a Rat while Blondie is a Pig? It's hard to judge one man the moral superior of the other; they backstab one another with equal relish at every opportunity. We turn to Angel Eyes for some clarification: Tuco is no less tough, but less smart than Blondie. How smart is Tuco? On one hand, he can barely sound out the word "unknown" on a tombstone. Yet in the "Ecstasy of Gold" sequence he races through the cemetery at such speed that the audience registers the tombstones as a pure blur, yet Tuco is obviously processing all the names at some superhuman rate until he finds Arch Stanton. Both Blondie and Angel Eyes see Tuco as an idiot -- Angel sees both his antagonists that way, despite his compliment to Blondie's intelligence -- but Tuco has the film's most famous moment of common sense: "When you draw a gun, shoot, don't talk." Tuco bears the brunt of the film's slapstick, though he gets some revenge on Blondie in the desert, but he's also the nearest to a sympathetic character of the three principals, the one with the most backstory and a hint of pathos in his past. We can root for Blondie but Leone seems to want us to feel for Tuco. Yet Blondie is the character most capable of feeling for others, even if he's not very capable. Tuco lacks compassion; finding Blondie doing their old con with a new partner, he takes Blondie away at gunpoint and leaves Blondie's new partner to hang. Blondie himself doesn't seem too torn up about it, but he has his own problems at that moment and the partner was new. But Blondie seems to learn compassion along the way while Tuco doesn't. Even so, Blondie is probably always too cool (rather than good) for us to care much for, while to the end we empathize with Tuco and maybe echo his closing opinion that Blondie is still a no-good son of a AHHH-AHHHHH-AHHH!!! And maybe that's how Leone had come to feel about the Eastwood character after three films, and maybe Eastwood realized that and, seeing diminishing returns, abandoned Leone for Hollywood and ultimate auteurship in his own right. This may still be a "Man With No Name" movie, but above all it's the one with Tuco, and it was good to see it on a big screen at the Madison Theater in Albany this weekend, with Eli Wallach's performance appropriately larger than life.

On the Big Screen: COPPERHEAD (2013)

The facial hair is more plausible than ever in Ron Maxwell's latest cinematic portrait of the Civil War era, and this time, focusing on the New York home front, the director of Gettysburg and Gods and Generals looks past the literary efforts of the Shaara family and back to the 19th century, when Harold Frederic wrote the source story -- which is no relation to the 1920 Lionel Barrymore silent movie of almost the same name. Frederic's story was adapted by Bill Kauffman, a writer I know as a contributor to The American Conservative magazine. Less orthodox than the title suggests, TAC is anti-interventionist in foreign policy -- they don't care for the "isolationist" label -- and opposed the invasion of Iraq. Kauffman envisioned Copperhead as primarily an anti-war movie, but he wanted to challenge audiences by making the case in the context of a "good war." The challenge puts audiences in a complicated position, because we understand that the character expressing unpopular opinions is supposed to be our protagonist. He's Abner Beech (Billy Campbell), a resident of "The Corners," a small community in northern New York. A staunch Democrat, he despises Abraham Lincoln and sees the war against secession as the first of many violations of the Constitution. Unfortunately for him, public opinion in The Corners has turned against him in the past decade. Once as staunchly Democratic as Abner himself, it turned Republican in the 1860 election, and after secession and the bombardment of Fort Sumter, most people rapidly caught up with the once-despised radicalism of the town's loudest abolitionist, Jee Hagadorn (Angus Macfadyen). It seems simple to them: the Confederates quit the Union and attacked the American flag, and that makes traitors of them and anyone who questions the need to suppress them. Abner and his family grow increasingly isolated, with only the Irishman (and thus reliable Democrat) Hurley (Hugh Thompson) at his side when they go to vote, without benefit of secret ballot, in the 1862 gubernatorial election. The Democratic candidate wins on a peace platform, further embittering The Corners against Beech.

Since our story comes from 19th century literature, there is a romantic complication. Abner's son Jeff (for Thomas Jefferson) loves Hagadorn's daughter Esther (Lucy Boynton), though she's inherited enough of her father's fanaticism that she can't stand the name Jeff, identifying it with Jefferson Davis. She convinces her beau to change his name to Tom, and he himself, in rebellion against his father's hostility to the Hagadorns, enlists for the war. He fights at Antietam and is reported missing. While Esther worries and Jee's own rebellious son (Augustus Prew) travels south as a civilian to find Tom, the fathers reveal themselves as equally insensitive extremists, Jee indifferent to Tom's fate in his ecstasy over the Emancipation Proclamation, Abner dismissing him as having brought his doom upon himself. Each man is so consumed by ideology that an individual life no longer matters to either of them.

A further complication: after Abner celebrates the Democratic victory with a bonfire on his farm, like a flaming thumb in the eye to the local majority, Esther learns that Republican extremists, including her father, plan to tar and feather him. She goes to the Beech farm to warn the family, and is trapped their when the mob arrives. When the mob accidentally sets the farmhouse on fire, the Beeches get out, but Esther doesn't. Just about this time, her brother arrives with a one-armed Jeff in tow. Having seen horrors down South, he sees more at home....

Admittedly, Kauffman and Maxwell wanted to complicate anti-war sentiment, and in doing so they play with fire. Copperhead begs the question whether one can only be anti-war without taking a side on the issues of the war in question. Can you oppose the Civil War, for instance, without implicitly endorsing secession and or slavery? For Abner Beech it's a split decision: he grudgingly admits that slavery is wrong, but considers it none of his business, while letting the Confederacy go is preferable, as far as he's concerned, to the ongoing bloodbath for which he blames Lincoln. Challenged by the town blacksmith (Peter Fonda), Abner claims to value the Union, but values local things more. It would have been interesting had some character asked him whether he valued anything more than the Constitution, given his obsession with Lincoln's actual or supposed violations of the sacred document. Reportedly, the filmmakers are more evenhanded toward Frederic's characters than the original author was, though that makes me wonder what sort of outrageous grotesque the original Jee Hagadorn was compared to Macfadyen's ranting, singing, cane-pounding fanaticism. While modern viewers can recognize Campbell's Abner as the sort of crank they see and hear today, you wonder whether people like Jee ever actually walked or limped on earth. While Abner remains the more sympathetic character, the film calls the character out when he grows too stubborn, self-righteous or simply hateful. He can't be called the hero of the film -- the story may have no real hero. But the film's very existence seems intended to carry on Abner's questioning of the Civil War. It offers no judgment of its own on the war, contenting itself with a lesson in tolerance and loving thy neighbor -- carefully including an extra attack on slavery -- to The Corners.  Abner's question -- whether this war or any war is worth it -- is left hanging. That ambiguity is a hard sell at a time when Django Unchained exploits the easy assumption that slaveholders deserve death. Almost inevitably, coverage of the film appears restricted to conservative media, which might create expectations of a more reactionary message than the film actually delivers.

Copperhead is at its best when Kauffman and Maxwell take time to portray village life in detail, from trips to the general store to the operations of the sawmill. It's most successful at the level of art direction, while the story's slow start actually works to adjust us to the pace of 19th century life. As a neophyte screenwriter, Kauffman exposes his limitations when characters debate each other; he can't vest those scenes with the life of authentic conversation, though he might excuse their clunkiness as illustrating Abner and Jee's increasing detachment from everyday concerns and real relationships. As with the writing, so with the acting. The younger performers who don't have to embody extreme political views generally fare better than the two stars. As for the direction, Maxwell doesn't have to worry about underbudgeted battles this time, and that's a good thing, as he's better at atmosphere than action. Regrettably, the dramatic climax of the picture, the fire scene, is its worst directed moment. The film's biggest failing, however, is the likelihood that people will leave it still wondering what Maxwell and Kauffman were trying to tell them. They might say they meant only to raise questions, but while they certainly succeeded at that, I'm not sure whether all the questions audiences ask will be those the authors intended.

On the Big Screen: LINCOLN (2012)

Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner's history play was many years in the making, in part because the once-mightiest Spielberg had a hard time getting backing for a history film. The delays cost him a star -- Liam Neeson -- who is ironically more bankable now than he was when Spielberg first proposed him for the title role. Given Lincoln's long road to the big screen, it's another irony that people this November are debating its relevance to current politics -- and a further irony that it is relevant. As it happens, Spielberg and Kushner have made a cinematic intervention, intentional or not, in a debate, not between the Democratic and Republican parties, but within the Democratic party and the larger liberal movement. This debate has gone on since the 2008 presidential primaries and will certainly continue into Barack Obama's newly-won second term. It's less a debate over personalities, though it originated in comparisons between Obama and then-Senator, now-Secretary Clinton, than over practical politics. Critics of Obama -- one of the most persistent and verbose is the historian Sean Wilentz -- worry that the President is too much a creature of rhetoric and the favorite of people too enamored with the supposed power of rhetoric. These critics feel that many liberals naively expect to rely too much on the power of ideas and argument, and are reduced to bitter helplessness when their eminently reasonable arguments fail to persuade intractable dissidents. Wilentz himself wrote a long, somewhat controversial piece that could serve, perhaps as much as Doris Kearns Goodwin's best-selling Team of Rivals, as a source text for Lincoln, criticizing a perceived perception among liberals that Abraham Lincoln relied entirely on his admittedly formidable powers of persuasive rhetoric -- that he saved the Union by delivering the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, and found answers to all problems in his speeches, if not in the funny stories he loved to tell. Wilentz invokes a more Machiavellian Lincoln, one who wasn't above various forms of sub-rhetorical persuasion and manipulation when those were necessary to realize his goals. For Wilentz's Lincoln, a noble goal justifies a broader, more effective range of means than many liberals permit themselves or think appropriate in politics. Wilentz's article was virtually a preview of Spielberg's film.

Kushner's screenplay focuses on the month of January 1865, after Lincoln's re-election but before his re-inauguaration, which under the old rules would take place in March. The Union is on the brink of attacking the Confederacy's last functioning port city, while the Confederate government has dropped hints of readiness to sue for peace. The President (Daniel Day-Lewis) is determined to get the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, already approved by the Senate, approved by the House of Representatives on its second try. Lincoln's Republican party controls the House, but he needs a two-thirds majority for a constitutional amendment and thus needs support from a largely-racist Democratic party for an amendment banning slavery. Lincoln faces a dilemma. There's a possibility that the war could end that month if he meets with the Confederate negotiators. But he worries that, should the war end before the amendment is ratified, ratification will never happen because he has justified action against slavery, including his earlier Emancipation Proclamation, as wartime measures. He worries especially that should the law revert to the status quo ante bellum, blacks already freed under the Proclamation could be returned to slavery. On the other hand, perpetuating the war for any period of time carries a personal risk. His eldest son Robert (Joseph [are you sure that isn't Robin Todd Lincoln?] Gordon-Levitt) is ashamed of missing the war in college and wants to enlist, while the prospect of losing another son -- a younger child died of illness in Abe's first term -- could well break Mrs. Lincoln's (Sally Field) mind, if not the Lincolns' marriage. The President's plan is to stall the peace negotiations and deny the existence of Confederate negotiators as long as possible while cajoling the necessary Democrats into supporting the amendment and dissuading Robert from enlisting.

What did you expect Old Abe would do? Wrap everything up with one big speech? History isn't so easy, and he must find different ways of persuading those Democrats. Since many are lame ducks, having lost their re-election bids last November, he hopes to entice them with promises of federal patronage. For further enticement Lincoln relies on some experienced political fixers summoned by Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn), a former party boss in New York State. When Seward tells the President that he's going to Albany to recruit some experienced ruthless scoundrels for the work, the Albany audience with which I watched the movie broke out in knowing laughter. The fixers, led by James Spader, are the comedy relief of the picture, but they prove a serious point: the end of slavery justifies these means. On occasions like this, you don't necessarily need to get everyone to share your opinion; you just need them to vote your way for whatever reason. This is the point modern writers like Sean Wilentz think that most modern liberals miss. Those modern liberals are represented on screen by "Radical" Republican floor leader Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones in a Gene Hackman-Lex Luthor apparatus), an uncompromising firebrand who favors complete and immediate racial equality, beyond what most politicians in 1865 could support. The Radicals oppose the "conservative" Republicans led by eminence grise Francis Preston Blair (former Lincoln Hal Holbrook) and consider Lincoln an unprincipled trimmer for failing to go all out for full equality. Lincoln's men in Congress fear that Stevens's support for the amendment could drive conservative Republicans away and make it impossible to close deals with those Democrats. The challenge for Lincoln is to get Stevens to tone down his rhetoric -- in fact to deny what he really believes -- in order to convince wavering legislators that the amendment institutes only equality before the law, not "equality in all things." Even after securing Stevens's humiliating compliance, Lincoln must still resort to a "lawyer's dodge" at the last minute as rumors of peace negotiations threaten to postpone the final vote on the amendment....

Spielberg sometimes strains within the self-imposed straitjacket of Kushner's screenplay. He wants to show more than the script requires and gets away with a brief opening battle scene that proves a flashback narrated by a black soldier in the true opening scene. Interestingly, Spielberg invokes The Godfather by pulling back from a close-up of the soldier to reveal the back of the star's head while the soldier goes on with a functional equivalent of an "I believe in America" speech, which Lincoln finally answers with small talk and a joke about his untrimmable hair. Lincoln's notorious jokes become a kind of Tarantinian device, serving as showoff business for Day-Lewis and within the story as a distancing and delaying tactic, stuff to fill the air as Lincoln contemplates his true answer or his next move. At these moments Day-Lewis approaches the enigmatic Lincoln of Gore Vidal's novel, perhaps the definitive fictional representation of Old Abe. But the main work of the film is to show a Lincoln made neither of marble or pure spirit, an intimately vulnerable man who can slap his son in public and threaten his wife with the madhouse in moments of anger -- someone who couldn't find an answer for everything with words. In a year of strong male star turns Day-Lewis, already a two-time Oscar winner, deserves consideration for a third along with such likely front-runners as Joaquin Phoenix (for The Master) and Denzel Washington (for Flight). People have commented about the age difference between Day-Lewis and his Mary, Sally Field, not to mention the age difference between Field and Mary Lincoln circa 1865, but as a two-time winner herself Field is a worthy consort and definitely delivers on whatever promise Spielberg saw in her. They're supported by a sprawling ensemble operating in different modes, from Jones's grandilouqent bluster to Spader's clowning, yet combining for a mostly convincing evocation of 19th century speech. The few anachronistic exceptions ("Slavery, sir? It's done.") can be forgiven.

Kushner and Spielberg succeed indisputably in making the points they want to make about Lincoln and the art of political persuasion. If there's a problem with Lincoln, it's that, after the point is made, the film goes on -- and as it goes on Spielberg slips his restraints and goes hunting after epiphanies. Worse, the director decides he can't leave without addressing the assassination, but goes at it indirectly, focusing on a child's grief in a theater other than Ford's before flashing back to the Second Inaugural, Lincoln reappearing in a flame for some parting comments as if this were The Greatest Story Ever Told. A more persistent problem for Spielberg is his inability to imagine a movie without hearing the music of John Williams. The old maestro contributes an understated yet predictably Ken-Burnsian score, intruding politely yet predictably at all the predictable moments, that proves again that Williams hasn't had much new to say musically for some time now. The music, however, is a superficial flaw, and the film's other faults keep their distance from an impressive core, leaving Lincoln as one of the superior American history films of recent times. It isn't as powerful as Spielberg and Kushner's previous collaboration because Lincoln doesn't give Spielberg as many opportunities for creative, forceful pictorial storytelling as Munich did, but after seeing Lincoln the word from Kushner that he's started work on a third screenplay for Spielberg comes as welcome news.

WESTBOUND (1959)

While making the films with Budd Boetticher for Columbia Pictures that have made his latter-day reputation as a western star, Randolph Scott also made pictures for Warner Bros. For his last Warners picture, the studio hired Boetticher to direct. Neither the producer nor the writers had worked with Scott before, and it's unclear whether the actor had anything like the creative control he enjoyed over his Columbia efforts. The end product still seems like a Randolph Scott movie, if somewhat less like a Boetticher film. The Civil War story lacks the spare clarity of the team's Columbia pictures, but remains grounded in certain story situations typical of later Scott films. Scott and Boetticher may also be responsible for a graver mood that prevails here than in other comparable patriotic Fifties westerns.

Scott plays John Hayes, a Union cavalry officer assigned to securing the Overland Stage route through increasingly hostile territory and assuring that Union troops in the West get paid. The deteriorating situation is made clear to him at a station where the manager insults a maimed veteran (Michael Dante) by putting salt in the young man's slice of pie. Hayes is a man who takes crap from no one and will not let anyone give crap to a brave man who gave up an arm for his country. He forces the station master to eat the pie. The situation sounds absurd but it establishes Hayes's understated power of intimidation.

After dropping Rod, the veteran, off on his farm for a reunion with his hardworking, feisty wife Jeanie (Karen Steele), Hayes discovers that the Overland agent in the next town has quit his job and gone over to the Rebs. Clay Putnam (Andrew Duggan) was an old friend of Hayes' until he won the woman (Virginia Mayo) both men had courted. As Hayes struggles to reestablish an Overland presence in the town, he finds allies in Rod and Jeanie and a dangerous enemy in Mace (Michael Pate), who becomes Putnam's right hand man in the Confederate effort to stop westbound stage traffic.

Good guys (Karen Steele and Michael Dante, above) and bad guys
(Michael Pate and Andrew Duggan, below) in Westbound.

Mace emerges as the real villain of the piece, while Putnam proves the sort of ambivalent antagonist you'd see in the Columbia pictures. With Hayes having reappeared, Putnam clearly feels insecure in his marriage and succumbs to alcoholism. But strangely, precisely because Hayes is his enemy, Putnam refuses to turn a wartime conflict into a personal matter. While Mace advises that the easiest way to resolve the situation is to assassinate Hayes, Putnam refuses to consider that option. He thinks he can drive Hayes from the field by pressuring stage drivers or stealing the Overland's horses. It's as if Putnam wants to prove to everyone that he doesn't fear Hayes as a returned romantic rival, but his choice of strategy enables Mace to commit a series of escalating atrocities for which Putnam is, for all intents and purposes, to blame.

Randolph Scott often plays a loner whose arrival in a community, no matter how righteous his purpose, tends to disrupt the local order. That makes him different from John Wayne, whose influence wherever his characters go is almost entirely positive and uplifting. Scott and Boetticher could play the star's subversive potential for laughs, as in Buchanan Rides Alone, or to more tragic effect in Decision at Sundown. His disruptive potential extends to the domestic sphere. Scott's films often include a female character whom we recognize as a suitable mate for the hero, but is burdened with an unfit husband or fiancee. The man may be unscrupulous or he may merely be weak, but Scott's superiority provokes a domestic crisis that is often resolved by the other man's demise, whether Scott ends up with the girl or not. The final Scott-Boetticher collaboration, Comanche Station, gives a twist to this gimmick as the Scott character and others spend the film questioning the character of a man who wouldn't venture out to rescue his captive wife, only to learn at the end that the loving husband just happened to be blind. Westbound anticipates this device by tying one of Hayes's potential mates, the stalwart Jeanie, to Rod the amputee who takes to heart the townsfolks' labeling of him as "half a man." But Hayes proves a subtle mentor to the troubled Rod, offhandedly showing how a man can use a rifle with one hand without any condescending motivational speeches. Westbound is also unusual in offering the Scott character two potential mates, including the more age-appropriate Norma Putnam, creating some suspense over which woman, if any, Hayes will end up with. But the filmmakers don't stack the deck in Scott's favor. Jeanie loves Rod despite his handicap, and Norma, as we eventually discover, loves Putnam despite his faults.

But because the Scott character has two potential mates, Westbound makes the fates of the two husbands a matter of further suspense. If Hayes deserves to get a girl, then one of the men must be doomed. Boetticher maintains this suspense during a drastic ratcheting up of violence. After Hayes and Rod recover horses stolen by Mace's men, Mace escalates the conflict. Going against Putnam's order, he sets up an ambush to kill Hayes, but Rod ends up walking through the fateful doorway instead. In an unusual approach, Rod is allowed to linger despite a doctor's declaration that his condition is hopeless. This being a movie, you can believe that his condition isn't hopeless, and the longer he lingers, the more you might believe it. Meanwhile, Mace perpetrates his supreme atrocity, wrecking a coach full of women and children and killing them all. Moments after Hayes is hammered with this news, Jeanie informs him that Rod, offscreen, has finally succumbed to his wounds. Now a reckoning between Hayes and Mace, who had humiliated our hero in town earlier in the picture, is unavoidable, but a desperately repentant Putnam becomes a wild card in the scenario. And after the climax of violence comes Hayes's ultimate choice, if the choice is his to make, between a once-lost love and a love yet to be....

See enough Randolph Scott films and the pattern of a "Randolph Scott film" becomes more recognizable. The man and his associates knew, by the 1950s, the sort of stories and situations that worked best for him. Whether Scott and Boetticher gave it a personal touch, or the Warner people tailor-made a story to suit Scott's strengths, Westbound is plainly a Scott vehicle. While the story in simplest terms is something Gary Cooper or any other Hollywood westerner could have performed, I suspect it would have been inferior with any other actor starring. Whether it would have been inferior with some one else directing is another story. While Scott was clearly comfortable with Boetticher by this point, I imagine that the other top Western directors of the decade -- Anthony Mann, Delmer Daves, etc. -- could have done just as well with the actor and the material. I don't have any problem with Boetticher's work here -- the image seems little compromised by the fullscreen "Starz Play" stream available on Netflix, except for the sequence when Mace's horsemen pursue a stagecoach across a too-sweeping expanse of road -- but the film overall plays less to the director's strengths, which I identify with a certain stoic minimalism, than it does to the star's. Boetticher probably should get credit for keeping the film personal as a Scott movie and getting the usual strong performance from the actor. I haven't seen enough of Scott in other hands yet to determine how much of his definitive screen persona is Boetticher's (or Burt Kennedy's) creation, but for now I'm inclined to give the director the benefit of the doubt. As a team, Boetticher and Scott were seven-for-seven. None of their collaborations fail to impress. Individual works by other directors and other stars may have been better films, but Boetticher and Scott were the most successful team in terms of quantity and quality during the greatest decade of Hollywood westerns.