What did you think of "Ride with the Devil"?   Good 77% 182   Bad 7% 16   Somewhere in between 3% 7   Haven't seen it 13% 30 Total Votes   235

Verdict: Worth the ride.

Details: Starring Tobey Maguire, Skeet Ulrich and Jewel. Directed by Ang Lee. Rated R for graphic war violence. 2 hours, 14 minutes.

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Review: Ang Lee works like the devil to put over "Ride With the Devil," his fervent, oddly gallant film about the fringes of the Civil War. And more often than not, he succeeds.

Not an easy task, not even for the director of such disparate movies as "The Ice Storm" and "Sense and Sensibility." Based on Daniel Woodrell's Civil War novel "Woe to Live On," "Devil" is as random, sprawling and piecemeal as the skirmishes it records.

Once upon a time in the Midwest, there were the pro-North Jayhawkers and the pro-South Bushwackers. Together, they spent most of the war tearing up the border states of Kansas and Missouri. Their "war" was more like a guerrilla gang action — Crips and Bloods on horseback. They lacked both uniforms and leaders. What they didn't lack was hate.

Jake Boedel (Tobey Maguire) and Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet Ulrich) are best friends from decidedly different backgrounds. Jake comes from sturdy German mercantile stock; his shopkeeper father, like most of his ilk, supports the Union. Jack Bull is Southern through and through; like his agrarian parents, he supports the Confederacy.

But this is no brother-against-brother tale. Rather, Jake embraces the Southern cause as fervently as his pal. Joining George Clyde (Simon Baker), the sort of aristocrat who looks as if he might have gone to school with Ashley Wilkes, and Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright), Clyde's best friend and freed slave, they all enlist with the Bushwackers. Eventually, they ride with Quantrill's Raiders into Lawrence, Kan., and participate in what some historians call the worst act of mass murder in our nation's history (at least 150 dead civilians).

The carnage in Lawrence is the picture's bloody centerpiece and its moral fulcrum. But most of the movie takes place in fits and starts. A confrontation at a farmstead is courteously interrupted so the women and children can leave before the shooting and burning continue. A wintry retreat in what amounts to little more than a hole in the ground gives the four men a chance to know one another better; it also introduces them to a broad-browed young widow (singer Jewel in a credible acting debut).

Like another film master, John Ford, Lee is fascinated by the contrast between our country's blood lust and its need to settle down, between carnage and domesticity. The characters speak in a kind of stilted, homespun, old-fashioned dialogue that somehow forces us to listen to them more closely. One moment we hear Jake's idealism and sense of honor; the next we hear his racism.

Further, Lee contrasts our four young believers with those for whom mayhem is a way of life: professional killers such as Black Jack (James Caviezel) or psychos like Pit Mackeson (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). Here are the seeds of Columbine High School and the Atlanta brokerage office shootings, the all-too-American taste for waving weapons as easily as unfurling flags. At the same time, Lee shows us the myriad kindnesses of the nonwarriors, the ones who risk their lives and their land simply by offering a hot meal.

For some, "Devil" will seem ultimately too scattered, too lacking in dramatic buildup and focus. Others may find it a sublime contemplation of the American character at a particularly revealing time in our struggle to become a nation. One contradictory image says it all: a newborn contentedly suckling the stub of a youth's finger blown off during the war. An oddly hearty welcome for a Johnny who has finally marched home for good.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service

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