Well, this good weather has me and Holt wanting to fling walnuts at mumblety-peg players, or something along those lines.

--Jake Roedel (after being asked to excuse himself on a pretext such as gathering walnuts or playing mumblety-peg)


With characteristic subtlety, Ang Lee uses the splendid Ride with the Devil to depict the Civil War not as a fight between the blue and the gray, but between the off-blue (the Union-sympathetic Jayhawkers) and the off-gray (the renegade Bushwhackers). The Civil War happened even in places where regular troops were absent, and Lee's thoughtful examination of the bloodshed between paramilitary outfits in Kansas and Missouri is a stunning testament not only to the complexity of American history, but to the ability of a top-notch director to explore and unravel that complexity through the medium of film.

Adapted from Daniel Woodrell's novel Woe to Live On, Lee's film presents the organized vigilante war between the Jayhawkers and the Bushwhackers through the eyes of Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire), a man whose ties to his very rebel-minded Missouri community lead him to side with the secessionist Bushwhackers. His comrades in arms, however, accept him less than enthusiastically. They are distrustful of him because he is the son of a German immigrant and because the 'Dutchies' are almost entirely Unionist in their sympathies. He finds friendship with a former slave named Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright) who has allied himself to the Bushwhackers for personal reasons, even though the Bushwhackers are invariably Confederate in their sympathies and overwhelmingly racist in their behavior.

In a card game that occurs rather late in the film, two Bushwhackers who have run out of money start wagering with the scalps of blacks and Germans. It's fascinating to see Roedel and Holt riding into battle with such men, trusting their lives to them. And Ang Lee seems to suggest that the Civil War should be as complicated a subject for all of us as it is for these two characters. The critical commentary on what the war was really about begins with a wedding scene in which Roedel observes that marriage is every bit as peculiar an institution as slavery and that no one objects when men enslave themselves to their brides at the altar. Just how seriously we are to take this claim of his does not become clear until we see him in a shotgun wedding with Sue Lee Shelley (Jewel) much later in the film.

But Lee never fails to take the conflict between North and South seriously. This isn't your typical after-school special in which hundreds of thousands of hayseed drones from Alabama march stupidly into the machine guns of clever Yankees while babbling about the inferiority of blacks. Lee goes out of his way to have us sympathize with the Bushwhackers at the outset. The first act of cold-blooded murder that we see is committed by Jayhawkers, who come across as glassy-eyed abolitionist cultists involved in a Holy War against anyone who ever said a kind word about a Southerner. Shortly thereafter, the Bushwhackers make "the Yankees pay dearly for their belief in appearances" by dressing up as Union soldiers and gunning down a group of Yanks, but only after determining that they are the ones responsible for killing their friends and family. They then kill a shopkeeper for the crime of trading with the enemy, and they burn his store as a sign to all who would trade with the Yankee aggressor, but they do not mistreat his wife.

Despite these early developments, however, Lee does not side with the Bushwhackers. He has Roedel defend his Southern sympathies by saying, "In my disobedience to [my father], I still obey the call to honor he himself taught me." The familiar (but apparently not familiar enough, since it is labeled 'revisionist' by those who know nothing of American history) Southern argument concerning self-determination and states' rights is given a reasonable chance to articulate itself through various characters, but we also hear the Northern side of the story through letters that are intercepted by Roedel. As one woman writes,

The Confederates claim that we strike at their liberty and rights, but what kind of liberty is it that takes away the liberty of others?

And as we become more and more familiar with the Bushwhackers, the frequency with which we encounter racial epithets and stories of violence done to blacks and plots to do ever greater violence increases. But there's no reason for us to jump to the conclusion that racial antipathy is everywhere, for we have the figure of George Clyde (Simon Baker), who bought Holt out of slavery and gave him his freedom as a gift. That may have been the best that Clyde could do under the circumstances, but after Clyde dies, Holt explains that he finally feels free. When Roedel objects that Clyde had already given Holt his freedom, Holt replies, "That wasn't really his to give, was it?"

Put another way, Ride with the Devil capitalizes on the very thing that we're used to seeing in great Westerns and great war movies alike: men who are plagued by their own doubts, but grimly determined to take a certain course of action because they simply can't allow themselves to do nothing in the face of what they perceive to be egregious wrongdoing. Surely Clyde meant well when he bought Holt out of slavery, but the act of doing so gave an implicit stamp of approval to the peculiar institution. And as much as it crushed Holt to be indebted to another person for his freedom, his plans are to go to Texas and find his mother so that he can buy her out of slavery. In an imperfect world, we all find ourselves making incredibly painful and problematic compromises. "It ain't right," Ride with the Devil moralizes (sounding rather like Unforgiven), "and it ain't wrong. It just is."

The cinematography is of course spectacular. Lee does a great job of giving us the kind of stunts that we're used to seeing in cavalry battles and shoot-outs, but he has reasons for the shots that he gives us. In a scene concerning a retreat, for example, a man moves from one galloping horse to another because his life depends upon it, not simply because he wants to show us that he can.

But as is usually the case with Lee's films, the intellectual content is every bit as compelling as the acting and the production. In what is probably the most important scene in the film, Roedel's best friend Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet Ulrich) must have his arm amputated in order to have any chance at living. Roedel has to saw the limb off as his friend writhes beneath him in agonizing silence so as not to betray their location to the nearby Unionists. After all the squirming and bloodletting, Chiles dies. An amputation is devastating; death even more so. But an ineffectual amputation is beyond devastating.

I was going to die, and you cut off my arm to save me, but I died anyway, and the last thing I felt was you cutting off my arm as an act of charity? Dude, that's wrong!

It is wrong, but sometimes it can't be helped. And what was the Civil War but an act of ineffectual amputation?


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DVD features:

Apart from the music video that Jewel made for the film ("What's Simple Is True"), the DVD extras are strictly textual. There is some information on how Woodrell's book came to Lee's attention. There are also snippets of information on some of the actors, but nothing terribly interesting or engaging.



Recommended: Yes