This month for Film Friday, I want to take a few weeks to look at something we often overlook at this time of year–the true meaning of sacrifice by those who have fallen in combat.
I don’t think we mean to do it. When Memorial Day rolls around, as it will in a few weeks’ time, we usually say all the right things, about duty, honor and bravery. And I think we honestly mean them. I grew up in a household with deep military ties, so this was always taken very seriously in my family. But for those of us who did not serve, or even among those who did but never faced the abject terror of our lives being at risk in a combat zone, it can be difficult to even imagine.
This is one area where art can move the needle, even just a little. Cinema is among the most immersive of art forms, in that it offers not only visuals, but sounds and music and drama in order to create a visceral sense of feeling in the audience. At its best it can do what any of the arts it draws from can only reach for–it can, for a brief instant, place a viewer in the middle of a scene.
A novel can transport your mind. A photograph or a newsreel can give you a sense of color or scale. A well acted part can evoke genuine emotion and well played music can establish mood and true feeling. All brought together, and done right, they can bring an audience as close as possible to a flavor of an experience. It’s never the same thing, but it can do enough to give a movie-goer just enough of a sense of time, place and mood to make an impact.
For the first entry in this month’s series then, I’m looking at the 1993 Civil War film Gettysburg. More than 600,000 American soldiers died in that conflict (counting both sides) so it was the single most devastating event in the history of our armed forces. I don’t want to stray into the politics of it, because in many ways we never stopped fighting that war — but that’s a topic better left to other folks who have more informed opinions than I do. Instead, what I want to focus on is how this movie puts such a spotlight on the way men face death.
There are so many ways this film tackles it. Just the Pickett’s Charge sequence alone, in which we are placed right in lockstep with the men marching across a mile of open ground, right into the heart of the opposing forces, would be enough. Or the Little Round Top scenes, a seemingly outgunned, and out manned regiment mounting a bayonet charge against an onrushing enemy.
But the best depiction, I think, comes in the form of Richard Jordan’s stunning performance. He plays Lewis A. Armisted, a Confederate general ordered to march his men right into the teeth of the enemy, a move that will almost certainly doom them all. Through him, we see the way notions of duty and honor collide with the real horror of violence and death.
The actor himself knew he was dying when he filmed the role, which lends everything about his performance an added level.
For a month when we look back to honor the men who fell in battle for this nation we love, this is a terrific film to transport us to one of those battlefields, where—just for a few moments–we get the briefest hint of what that really meant.
Frank Cavallo 