GETTYSBURG (1993) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Ronald F. Maxwell
Tom Berenger, Jeff Daniels, Martin Sheen,
Sam Elliott, Richard Jordan, Stephen Lang,
C. Thomas Howell, Kevin Conway, Andrew Prine,
Richard Anderson, George Lazenby, John Diehl
Ted Turner's storybook recreation of the Civil War battle captures the scope of the clash and some of the strategy, while sidestepping its colossal savagery. (Almost as many Americans died at Gettysburg as in the entire Vietnam War. That's a lot of severed limbs and screaming men and corpses on the battlefield.) The acting's quite good, despite a script that favors speech-making over conversation. (Jeff Daniels, playing Union Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, could be apologizing for the entire picture when he ends an address to a group of mutinous soldiers by remarking, "I didn't mean to preach.") Daniels, in fact, gives the movie's most believably heroic performance, and Chamberlain's valiant defense of a strategic hill is the film's most exciting sustained sequence. Martin Sheen looks troubled as Robert E. Lee, the brilliant, charismatic Confederate commander whose misguided stubbornness (and incomplete scouting reports) determined the battle's outcome. (The Confederate charge into the center of the Union line on the last day is sheer suicide, but nobody outranks Lee, and nobody can counteract Lee's command.) The battle scenes are more picturesque than bloody - any movie that depicted the war's real carnage would probably be unwatchable - and the second-unit work looks a little sloppy, with some reenactors standing idly by while others catch bayonets and musket balls a few feet away. But on its own romanticized terms, "Gettysburg" is a significant accomplishment, an illuminating epic that brings history to life and holds your attention, speeches and all, for most of its four-and-a-half-hour running time.
Richard Anderson
(1926-2017)
