This week we find buried treasure,
a critically important, exhilarating film in the resume of director Ang Lee,
who with his friend, writing partner and producer James Schamus has given us
three top drawer queer themed films: The Wedding Banquet, Brokeback Mountain
and Taking Woodstock. In deciding to adapt Daniel Woodrell’s Civil
War novel, Woe to Live On By, Lee and Schamus were embarking on an
unusually daunting challenge, even by their illustrious standards: translating
a little known sidebar of America’s greatest domestic crisis into popular
entertainment, attempting to shoot an epic on an independent film budget, with
a largely unknown cast of twenty-something actors, many of whom were just
bubbling under their first stab at stardom.
In a DVD commentary track recorded
for this Criterion Collection edition of Ride with the Devil, Schamus
admits that the film is a kind of accidental dress rehearsal for their future
cowboys in love saga.
“So clearly this is Brokeback
Mountain territory that we’re in now – a bunch of guys, living in the
woods, hanging out, loving each other -- Ang has always been drawn to stories
of friendship and particularly to the nature of male friendship in his work and
no more so than in Ride with the Devil.”
Ang Lee is even more direct in
noting this civil war story’s roiling queer subtext.
“It’s a coming of age story, young
boys, their competitive jealousies all play out -- when I did this film, I had
done The Wedding Banquet, I’m not that innocent about putting homosexual
scenes on the screen – when you do this scene you can’t help but see that some
of the flamboyant characters might be gay themselves. The book never
illustrated that and this is not a project about that issue but you can see the
gay subtext all over the place – somehow I feel I’m doing another gay film in
this one. Actually it plays pretty innocently as friendship, as affection, as
living together but all the psychology is going on.”
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Ang Lee’s 1999 “pre-Western” -- a
bloody lost chapter of our Civil War -- features a stellar ensemble. Tobey
Maguire shines as an idealistic German American teen (Jake “Dutchie” Roedel),
fighting with Southern guerrillas in Bloody Kansas/Marauding Missouri who
undergoes a change of heart after bonding with a newly freed slave, Daniel Holt
(Jeffrey Wright). The acting gem in this two and a half hour epic is the
hair-raising rivalry between Maguire and a feral young killer: Jonathan
Rhys-Meyers imbues his Pitt Mackeson with the cultural/racial mojo we associate
with flying the Confederate flag. The young Irish actor – with his skinny
torso, angular features, shoulder length hair, dandy attire and cold eyes –
becomes a kind of androgynous Clint Eastwood, miming a scary bi-polar charm
that foreshadows the transformation of soldiers into outlaws (Jesse James) as
well as a preview of his tennis pro killer in Woody Allen’s Match Point.
The “Tobey/Johnny” showdown
displays a screen chemistry that could have produced an alternative Jack and
Ennis if Lee had gotten the Brokeback gig a few years
earlier.
Writer Schamus adroitly employs
language to undercut our intoxication for re-fighting the Civil War from a
Southern perspective. “Johnny” is simultaneously sexy and menacing as he spits
out Tobey’s derogatory screen nickname, “Dutchie,” with murderous intent.
In a heart stopping scene Pitt and
Jake nearly shoot it out in a Lawrence, Kansas restaurant – as in the
background their “bushwacker” buddies conduct a vicious massacre of the
able-bodied male town folks: this well documented piece of history qualifies as
one of the worst atrocities in the entire war. The scene is given a gut
wrenching verisimilitude by the intensity of the actors and the beautifully archaic,
at times profane, and oddly formal words they hurl at each other.
Pitt – Rhys-Meyers dressed and
cavorting, at Lee’s suggestion, like a modern rock star (like his character in
Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine) – demands that Jake allow two civilians (an
old man and a small boy) to go outside to face execution. Jake demurs.
“We’ll attend to them once we’ve
had our vittles.”
“Why you little Dutch
son-of-a-bitch, you do what I tell ya or I’ll kill ya!”
“And when do you figure to do this
mean thing to me, Mackeson? Is this very moment convenient for you, it is for
me.” (Jake draws on Pitt)
“The hell with it, there’s plenty
more of them jayhawkers to kill, anyhow. I’ll see you back in Missouri, you
tiny little sack of shit!”
After spitting out those words
Mackeson leaves the building the way Jagger might, with swash of his hips, his
right hand twirling in a rude gesture. Mackeson’s homicidal/suicidal manner is
doubly scary, it allows him to waltz through the killing fields with a kind of
satanic immunity.
Flipping back to Lee’s commentary
track, you’ll get a vicarious charge from hearing the director chuckling as he
repeats Pitt’s oath in jest, indicating his creative satisfaction with how this
first of two non-shooting shootouts was pulled off by his barely out of their
teens actor desperadoes. Lee and Schamus are scrupulous in using the
Southerners’ 19th century almost Shakespearean English to signal an
odd code of chivalry that lies beneath the raw violence of the main plot. Later
this language will prove a crucial underpinning for a magnificent scene where
Holt stops fighting for the Confederacy and declares his emancipation in a
finale that has him and Jake salute each other in a tribute to the journey
they’ve been on: The white boy addressing a former slave by his full Christian
name, “Daniel Holt,” to be followed by Holt’s lovingly uttered “Jake Roedel,”
just before heading out to the frontier to become a symbolic first black
cowboy.
The film is graced by Tobey Maguire’s
first adult role (and sex scene) -- Maguire projecting an inner decency while
shedding puppy dog innocence: a screen test for Peter Parker.
Special features include two
commentary tracks: the first with Lee and Schamus; the second with the crew; a
video chat with Jeffrey Wright; and a booklet with background on the historical
events that inspired Woodrell’s novel.