132 GETTYSBURG
sympathetic notices expressed serious reservations regarding the film’s sheer length,
shapelessness, portentous musical score, excessive speechifying, and uneven
acting. Film critic Ken Ringle voiced the majority viewpoint when he termed Get-
tysburg “the most ambitious and magnificently flawed cinematic undertaking
since Apocalypse Now.” Ringle praised the film’s seriousness for attempting to
explore “such weighty abstractions as duty, brotherhood, justice and liberty. And
it does so at times to great effect.” But Ringle also deplored “Martin Sheen’s woolly-
headed per for mance as Robert E. Lee... as a kind of crazed religious mystic: a
Confederate Jim Jones invoking his legions to bullets instead of poisoned Kool Aid
for no more clearly discernible reason” (Ringle, 1993). More than a few critics also
noted that the false beards and mustaches worn by most of the principal charac-
ters were suspiciously well combed, outsized, and immobile. Indeed, the movie’s
unintentionally comical tonsorial excesses garnered Gettysburg a 1993 Stinkers
Bad Movie Award for Worst Fake Beards. Conversely, most critics singled out Jeff
Daniels for his brilliant and moving per for mance as the gallant and resourceful
Col. Chamberlain at Little Round Top and rued the fact that Daniels dis appeared
from the picture’s second half.Reel History Versus Real History
As regarding the actual conduct of the battle, historians credit Gettysburg with
achieving a high degree of historical accuracy, though some commentators have
criticized the movie for a rather skewed emphasis as to what it chooses to drama-
tize. For example, the middle third of the movie focuses almost exclusively on Col.
Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine’s successful defense of Little Round Top,
while mostly ignoring heavy fighting at Cemetery and Culps hills on the Union
line’s northern flank that were of equal, if not greater, moment. Though it aspires
to be even- handed, Gettysburg has also been criticized for its pro- Confederacy
slant— though that perspective originates from Shaara’s Killer Angels, which it
closely follows. Nonetheless, the film’s implicit racial politics remain suspect.
Incredibly, among a cast of thousands, only one African American appears in Get-
tysburg in a brief background shot. Furthermore, the movie’s 21,000- word script
features only five passing mentions of the words “slave” or “slavery”—an unconscio-
nable slighting of the Civil War’s po liti cal under pinnings. Fi nally, perhaps due to
the fact that it was originally intended as tele vi sion fare valorizing martial glory,
Gettysburg is a noticeably sanitized vision of Civil War combat. Through no fault of
their own, the modern actors and reenactors are generally too well dressed and cor-
pulent for the sake of verisimilitude— Lee’s ragged army was starving— and on-
screen bloodshed and environmental destruction are kept at palatable levels. In
real ity, Napoleonic military tactics (e.g., frontal attacks in close- order formations),
combined with formidable mid-19th- century weaponry— large- caliber rifled mus-
kets with effective ranges of 200 to 300 yards and highly mobile artillery pieces
(average range: 1,700 yards)— inflicted grotesque injuries on a grand scale. The film
conveys the kinetics of battle without really depicting its horrific carnage in a vis-
ceral way.