USA, 1999

Director: Ang Lee

Ang Lee deserved credit for tackling the Civil War from an unconventional angle, but the nearly two-and-a-half-hour epic he ended up with is essentially three movies strung together, only one of them very good. Ride With the Devil is based on Daniel Woodrell's novel, Woe to Live On, set on the Missouri-Kansas frontier rather than the Eastern regions where the well-known pitched battles of the war took place. The rebels at the heart of the film are real good old boys, whooping young guerrilla fighters who are fiercely loyal to the cause of secession even as their families are often divided. That situation leads to some some exciting battle scenes, but the exploration of clashing loyalties that it promises never really takes on a life outside the script. The main character, Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire), is a son of German immigrants in Missouri who breaks with his pro-Union father to join his friends among the "bushwackers" as they take to the country to fight the Union and its supporters. Along the way he develops a friendship with a slave who fights with his small rebel band, and in the end the film veers off into a half-hearted love story involving Jake and the widow of a friend (late-90s folk-pop star Jewel). The prospect of seeing the perenially likeable star of Pleasantville and Lee's The Ice Storm as a Southern racist with Kid Rock hair is enticing, and a few early scenes suggest he might have been able to pull it off, but the story too quickly makes him into a nice guy, the soldier who questions the wisdom of war and eventually retreats from it. He and Jewel have no chemistry, and the long ending sequence that was probably intended to be romantic, touching, and funny is none of the above. A better subject for a movie would have been Pitt Mackeson, a cruel bushwacker who has it in for Roedel. Played by a menacingly fey Jonathan Rhys Meyers, he gets his revenge by stealing every scene. As usual, Lee does a good job with the setting and period details. The scenery speaks for itself, showing off an alternately lush and rugged region that it's easy to imagine people struggling both to live on and to save. It's too bad that passion doesn't shine through in the movie.