THE CROSSING (2000) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Robert Harmon
Jeff Daniels, Roger Rees, Sebastian Roche,
Steven McCarthy, John Henry Canavan, David Ferry
Washington crosses the Delaware to attack the Hessians at Trenton, and Jeff Daniels breathes a little life into the man behind the face on the dollar bill. Unlike Grant and Lee in the Civil War, Washington didn't have the advantage of being photographed, and his image is more or less fossilized in old paintings and engravings. He's always formally posed in them. He looks impassive. At the same time, he was the American Revolution's indispensable man, the charismatic field commander whose leadership kept the cause alive when everything else was falling apart. His decision to attack Trenton at Christmas wasn't just desperate and daring, it was (according to most of his associates) insane. That he pulled it off, after a year's worth of disastrous defeats, was a military miracle. It altered the course of the war. This made-for-TV movie does a nice job of capturing that, along with some colorful language from Washington as he's getting into the boat that will take him across. We sure never got that in our fourth-grade history books. If we had, maybe more fourth graders would take an interest in history.
