Susan Granger’s review of “RIDE WITH THE DEVIL” (USA Films)
Before making Gone With the Wind, David O. Selznick spent years searching for the perfect “unknown” actress to play Scarlett O’Hara, realizing that a famous Hollywood star would never be believable in the role. It’s too bad the Taiwanese director Ang Lee didn’t follow his precedent. When celebrity pop singer Jewel appears, dressed like a 19th century farm girl, it’s jarring, breaking the suspension of disbelief that is necessary for this epic to be effective. In this revisionist Civil War saga, set in the border state of Missouri, childhood friends Tobey Maguire and Skeet Ulrich join a rag-tag, rebellious guerrilla group called the Bushwhackers who are determined to wreak revenge on the Union Army and its Southern sympathizers, eventually joining William Quantrill who led a notorious 1863 raid into Lawrence, Kansas. Their cohorts include their leader James Caviezel, courtly Simon Baker, his former slave Jeffrey Wright, and vicious Jonathan Rhys Meyers. They meet up with this pretty war widow – that’s Jewel – who, predictably, complicates their lives when they seek winter shelter in a hillside dugout. Despite the meticulous historical accuracy in the screenplay by producer/writer James Schamus, adapted from Daniel Woodrell’s novel Woe to Live On, there’s an emotional detachment, as though Ang Lee were examining the morals and mores of the disillusioned Confederacy in this time and place in the same way he delved into the sexually promiscuous ’70s in a Connecticut suburb in The Ice Storm. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, Ride With the Devil is a chaotic, faltering, floundering 5. But Ang Lee almost redeems himself with an eloquent, profoundly touching scene in which Maguire reads aloud a stolen letter from a mother to a Union soldier.
