Jon Erwin’s account of George Washington’s first war is handsomely built and stiff as a portrait. It admires its man so completely that it forgets to make him one, and the battles it stages with care are undone by a hero nothing can touch.
Jon Erwin directs, and writes with Tom Provost and Diederik Hoogstraten, a film about George Washington before anybody had heard of him: a young Virginia surveyor in the 1750s, sent west by Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie into forests where Britain and France are arguing over the Ohio country. The tagline says that 250 years of history begins with one man, and the film believes it. That is the trouble. William Franklyn-Miller plays Washington as tall, quiet and correct in every scene, and in 121 minutes we did not see him do one thing he turned out to be wrong about. A man who is never wrong is not a character. He is a statue that has been given lines.
The ground it stands on is solid. Kristopher Kimlin shoots the woods and rivers in clear grey daylight, and in the fighting you can always tell which side is where, which is more than many larger war films manage. Chad Krowchuk’s production design gives the Virginia houses and the frontier forts a used look; the timber seems cut rather than bought. Nadine Powell’s costumes let you tell a British regular from a colonial officer from a woodsman at a glance. The skirmishes are staged with evident care for how the thing was actually done, and for a while we thought the film might earn its plainness.
The cast is better than the writing. Ben Kingsley plays Dinwiddie as a man counting the cost of everything, and he supplies the few dry minutes the film has. Kelsey Grammer’s Lord Fairfax is a patron who enjoys being one. Mary-Louise Parker, as Mary Washington, is given a worried mother and does what can be done with a worried mother. Mia Rodgers and Joel Smallbone, as Sally Cary and William Fairfax, are the two points of a love triangle that one of the film’s own teasers, titled around who Sally will choose, sells harder than the film does. Andy Serkis arrives as General Edward Braddock, a man who knows how war is fought and will not be told otherwise, and he is the only person on screen allowed to be a fool.
The screenplay is the problem, and it is the problem most critics have named. Everyone speaks in sentences that could be cut into a plaque. Washington is told he is destined for something, and then he is destined for it, and nothing between the telling and the arriving costs him anything. We were bored, and then we minded being bored, because a young man with a rich patron, a dead brother’s example and a war he helped start is not boring material. The enslaved people who worked the land these families lived from do not appear, and the film does not seem to have noticed the gap. Parker Adams and David de Vos cut it as a run of episodes, each ending on a lesson, so that it plays like a very expensive schools programme.
The last stretch, which we will not describe, sends Washington through a battle as though he had been issued with a different set of rules from everyone else. The effects that have to carry it, the smoke and the shot, are not good enough to bear the weight, and the Kiners’ score climbs under every near miss to tell us how to feel about it. We laughed once, at a moment plainly built to lift us out of our seats, and then felt slightly mean, because the film’s earnestness is not a crime. It is only a substitute for drama.
Michael Mann filmed this same war in The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and understood that the forest was frightening and the men in it were tired and afraid. Erwin’s forest is a backdrop and his men are examples. Against the genre’s own standards this is a modest, tidy picture that never once risks the audience’s good opinion of its hero.
One of its teasers calls it the number one action film in America, and there is an appeal for money attached to the end. Both tell you what sort of film this is. Families who want their history with the awkward parts sanded off will get exactly that, and a decent cast in good coats. Everyone else will spend two hours waiting for the man to make a mistake, and he never does.
