Director Ang Lee’s 1999 film Ride With The Devil is very much in aesthetic tune with many of the man’s other decidedly lightweight films, like The Ice Storm, The Hulk, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and the atrocious Brokeback Mountain. It basically drapes a melodramatic soap operatic plot over what could be fodder for a great filmic drama. Instead, we get, at best, a hit and miss film that has moments that are as bad as those in Brokeback Mountain, and a few as good as any ever filmed, which points out that Lee simply has no vision as a director. On the negative side is the stunt casting of then-hot singer Jewel (Kilcher) as war widow Sue Lee Shelley, an anomic screenplay that tosses loads of characters at the viewer in the first 10 or 15 minutes, expecting one to sympathize with them, and simply letting the 148-minute film (The Director’s Cut in the new The Criterion Collection edition) go on about 30-40 minutes too long to hold interest.
Going in reverse order, most of the scenes added back in (as confirmed in a commentary by Lee and his screenwriter, James Schamus) simply do not advance the plot, and, despite Lee’s claims, do not add anything to the milieu either. In short, the studio hacks were right: the film was too long even in its initial release. Adding back almost 20 minutes of footage detracts greatly from the, to be generous, mediocre original film. Second, out of the cast of characters thrust at the viewer, the only one, outside of lead actor Tobey Maguire’s Jake ‘Dutchy’ Roedel, is Jonathan Rhys-Meyers’ psycho-effeminate Pitt Mackeson. Meyers’ portrayal, in fact, is the only arguably great thing in this film. Jeffrey Wright’s ex-slave character, Daniel Holt, is a relative dullard and bore, while Jewel’s essay as Sue Lee is utterly inert. There is not a single moment one does not see her attempting to ‘act.’ Other than the obvious, hoping to cash in on her then mega-celebrity, there simply is no reason for her to be in this film, and a good screenwriter would have excised her character, and the subplot of her romances with Chiles and Roedel, for both dramatic and time considerations (losing her character would have gotten rid of more than the 30-40 extraneous minutes suggested above).
The actual story (from a novel, Woe To Live On, by Daniel Woodrell) has potential, but screenwriter Schamus dilutes it with too many characters, and takes far too long to get to the central event of the film, the 1863 Lawrence, Kansas Massacre led by William Quantrill and his band of Raiders. It was one of the worst atrocities of the Western Theater of the U.S. Civil War, but it is fairly marginalized in the film as simply another raid in the lives of the bushwhackers that Roedel and his pal, Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet Ulrich), join after Chiles’ clan is killed by Jayhawkers, along with Holt, Mackeson, George Clyde (Simon Baker), Holt’s friend and the man who bought and freed him, and Black John (James Caviezel). The problem is that so much happens so quickly, with no real way to establish the personalities of the characters, that they blend into a gray mush, and that by the time each of them dies, the viewer not only does not care, but ends up asking, was that guy the one who...?, because they are almost indistinguishable.
Article comments
1 - Greg Barbrick
My first thought was also "Why?" Criterion is noted for some tremendous catalog titles, how did this one qualify? Also thank you for telling it like it is about Brokeback. I will be curious to see how many comments brand you as a homophobe for not fawning over that shallow excersize in Political Correctness.
Spot on, in my opinion.