My Five Year Plan

I was looking at an old piece that I wrote for a symposium my old film journal did on the films of Ang Lee - during the roundtable meeting, everyone called dibs on Lee’s filmography before I had the chance to pick a film to write about. Upon returning to my dorm and looking at his IMDb page, I noticed that every film nerd in the room had forgotten he had even made this film, so I claimed it for myself. And then I actually had to watch the damn thing. Below, my piece, from the Spring 2006 issue of Montage:

And so, drunk on the middlebrow plaudits of The Ice Storm and a rising budget from Universal, Ang Lee did what every filmmaker does at this point in his career – he nearly threw it all away. One only requires a modicum of critical acumen to recognize that Ride with the Devil, Lee’s 1999 Civil War epic, is perhaps his worst film. Seven years off, its existence is almost mythical, a forgotten attempt at that great directorial pretension – the ‘American origin story.’

What to make of this strange, uninvolving work? Where did it disappear to and why? The film opened on eight screens, never expanding past its aborted New York and Los Angeles runs. In its lead roles as Confederate revolutionaries it featured the twinky Tobey Maguire and Skeet Ulrich, subtly laying the groundwork for the homosocial reappropriation of American masculinity that Lee would explore in 2005’s Brokeback Mountain. Yet most of the discourse produced on the film today concerns its stultifying stunt-casting of singer-songwriter Jewel in a prominent role. Where did Lee and constant collaborator James Schamus go so wrong?

Ride with the Devil has its origins in Daniel Woodrell’s revisionist Civil War novel Woe to Live On. An exploration of a forgotten theater of that war, the guerrilla backwoods of Missouri, the novel and film tell the story of Jake Roedel (Maguire), a Dutch immigrant’s son who with friend Jack Bull Chiles (Ulrich) joins a rag-tag company of Confederate bushwhackers that travels the countryside pillaging pro-Union villages. Along the way, friends die, love blossoms, and Jake even gets a lesson or two on the Dignity of the Negro, here played by Jeffrey Wright, one of our great performers and the only actor in the picture who walks away untarnished.

Let’s start on the basest level of critical analysis: the film, formally, is a mixed bag. Frederick Elmes’ cinematography is immaculate, conjuring the majesty of mid-19th century landscape painting while still maintaining a fluidity of motion. The production design and costuming are serviceable. Its failures, chiefly, are in its nearly uniformly poor performances, its shockingly mechanical dialogue (“With that black Republican Abe Lincoln in the White House, Missouri is no longer safe from the depredations of Jennison and his Kansas Jayhawkers.”), and its spiritless direction, which makes for murky interior compositions.

Now let’s move beyond that, specifically addressing the action in the film, which is remarkably stylized. Nowhere else in Lee’s oeuvre – not in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, not even in Hulk – does Lee present violence in such a weirdly aestheticized manner. As if transposed from the late ‘60s or early ‘70s, the blood (and there is a lot of blood) in the film is a hot pink, and it spurts out from wounds violently, fluidly, as in the films of Sam Peckinpah. As with Peckinpah, there’s a mordantly comic aspect to the violence: shot in the hand, Tobey yelps with forced anguish, “Damn! They took my pinky!” Is Lee explicitly linking his examination of war trauma to Peckinpah’s explorations of America’s culture of violence? The film does not explicitly answer the question, but instead buries it in the ennui of endless dinner table scenes, where Our Confederates inevitably find themselves in nuanced discussion about American identity and the autonomy of (white) man. None of this is particularly interesting, especially coming out of the mouth of Maguire, in full-on wide-eyed Peter Parker dork mode (“I promised that I wouldn’t cut my hair until the war was over!”)

What of the film’s representations of masculinity and femininity? The film is overwhelmingly male-dominated, with the only female role of more than two lines being Jewel’s anachronistically sexually-liberated war widow. And those male characters are, more often than not, paired together in a vaguely homoerotic fashion throughout the film. After all, the emotional thrust of the plot largely relies on the love triangle not of competing lovers but of Jewel’s Sue Lee – an avatar of heterosexual lust and domesticity – pulling Jack Bull away from his friendship with Jake.

If Lee’s work seems adventurous here, the film’s capitulating ending defeats utopian readings. The war ending and Skeet lost, Tobey is reunited with Jewel – they slowly fall in love and raise Skeet and Jewel’s baby in a painfully awkward reconstruction of the domestic unit. In the film’s single most absurdly awful scene, Tobey watches on as Jewel suckles her bastard child like he’s watching paint dry. There is struggle – Jake, less open to marrying his friend’s girl, is eventually forced into a shotgun wedding by the local minister. In a turn of phrase that bolsters queer readings of the film, Tobey exclaims of the marriage, “It’s being shoved down my throat! If anything’s being shoved, I like doing the shoving!” Later, faced with the possibility of Spider-Man’s first sexual contact, we’re treated to this hilarious exchange:

Sue Lee: “Have you ever been with a woman before?”
Jake: “No, but I’ve killed fifteen men.”

Eventually, the homoerotic is defeated, symbolized at the end by Tobey chasing off Jonathan Rhys-Meyers’ theatrically longhaired Confederate dandy from his terrified family. Here Tobey wields a phallic rifle, its length emphasized through depth of field, to scare of Rhys-Meyers’ demasculinized Southern traditionalism in favor of the masculinity of fatherhood and the American West. Rhys-Meyers, who is simply terrible in this picture as an villainous effete racist in the company of bushwhackers, camps up every scene he’s in with unspeakable pulp nuggets like “I’ll see you back in Missoura you steamin’ sack of shit!” and “What a horrible fate. OH WHAT A HORRIBLE FATE.” With the dandy chased off into the woods, the reconstructed American family is sent off by Lee and Schamus to travel westward in search of Manifest Destiny in a Conestoga wagon, presumably to kill Injuns and populate the land with pretty white babies.