At times the humorous mercurial tone recalls something of Robert Benton’s Bad Company another tale of Civil War vagabonds on

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Published: July 29, 2010

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At times the humorous, mercurial tone recalls something of Robert Benton’s Bad Company, another tale of Civil War vagabonds on the run. The middle section takes a long breather to concentrate upon the trio of Jake, Jack and Holt as they hole up in a hillside dugout for the winter, visited – perhaps a little too prettily – by a war widow, Sue Lee (played by Jewel, singer-songwriter du jour). He also uses his soft voice to bring out Jake’s musing philosophical bent; after he gets his little finger shot off in an ambush, he explains to Jack how there’s advantage in the loss – should he ever die and rot on some battlefield, his family will be able to identify him by his missing pinky. That’s a hell of a consolation.Lee paces his film very deliberately, alternating flurries of bloodiness with passages of calm. The prisoner is sent on his way, and we think no more of him until a report one day reaches Jake that the freed soldiers went back to their town and slew Jake’s father in the street. It’s one of the great moments in Tobey Maguire’s performance, reacting to this devastating news with a kind of dazed disbelief: “I set him free,” Jake says wonderingly to his fellows “You saw me do it”. Jake, a mild-mannered young fellow, is doubly an outsider, being born to a farmer of German stock and the only man among these marauders who can read and write.

His companions, a motley bunch, include George Clyde (Simon Baker) and the black slave he freed, Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright), nominal leader Black John (James Caviezel) and a mad-dog gunman named Pitt Mackeson (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). The early stages of the film are occupied with swift and unheroic blasts of violence.More pertinently, it’s a war between neighbours, which Lee conveys with a fine economy of touch and poignancy of detail. When Jake and Jack return to camp after their latest scrape they notice a group of chained Union prisoners, one of whom calls out to Jake – they knew each other as boys. Jake secures the man’s release, on the condition that he takes a message to his superiors offering an exchange of men. They wore their hair long, favoured dandyish duds and murdered with a savagery remarkable even in those unforgiving years.
The film’s focus is the coming-of-age of Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire) and his best friend, Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet Ulrich), who join up with the bushwhackers after their lives are torn apart by Union forces. Ride With The Devil is based upon a novel by Daniel Woodrell and bears the hallmarks of epic.

It’s a grand panorama of love and war set on the Kansas-Missouri border, yet its heroes are not at all the traditional embodiments of courage and nobility one might expect. Being a director who likes to stand at an angle to his subjects, Lee has chosen a story about bushwhackers, a renegade band of paramilitaries who fought for the Confederate cause. “I grew up watching martial arts movies, so they’re in my blood, but getting them on screen is a different thing altogether. The wire work,” he grimaces, “You know, making people fly?”As usual, the director has set himself an impossible task Still, if anyone can make actors fly, it’s Ang Lee.. The Taiwan-born director Ang Lee can’t be faulted for ambition. Following his trilogy of domestic comedy dramas (Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman) he went on to explore Regency England in Sense and Sensibility and Watergate-era US in The Ice Storm.

Different as they are in period and setting, his films share common cause in their delicate notation of social codes and the underlying passions those codes are intended to check. Never likely to cover the same ground twice, Lee and his screenwriter, James Schamus, have taken on the weighty and still emotionally fraught subject of the American Civil War. For now, though, he’s heading back to where he began with the Beijing-based samurai movie, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.Three months into a five-month shoot Lee’s struggling with the fight scenes. It took me years to get back my sense of self.”That has worked, of course, to his advantage. The great thing about Lee is his ability to put himself into different places and times with an uncanny historical and emotional accuracy. Then again,” he adds, “I do try to avoid being black and white. When I grew up in Taiwan,” he continues, “it was the most anti-Communist place in the world Everything to do with Communism was banned.

Then when I went to the States and started to read Communist books it was a big shock to me after all those years, to discover we were the bad guys My whole value system was turned upsidedown. Boot camp followed in which the cast had weapons training and were fed period snacks such as salt pork bacon. Maybe, I suggest, his mixture of rehearsal and history seminars was a way to sneak a little of his father’s education into the entertainment business.”Perhaps subconsciously I suppose I can be a bit preachy at times Not only to the actors, but maybe with the audience as well. While it’s not difficult to picture Lee dancing with his cast in Sense and Sensibility, it’s harder to imagine the softly-spoken director down on the range for Ride With the Devil.While Lee never went bareback riding with the boys, he did take them paintball shooting, before giving them big folders of American history to read.


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