Glory (1989, Edward Zwick) spins a formulaic, feel-good narrative over a not so well known part of the Civil War: the experience of blacks fighting for the Union, a story that is told through the perspective of their white commanding officer. Hollywood has notoriously failed to represent minorities over the years, and insofar as the history of blacks fighting in the Civil War is another untold story, this movie is as much about the black experience in Hollywood as it is their experience on the battlefield. Ultimately, though, it cannot tell that story without channeling it through the perspective of the white hero and the dominant, formulaic mode of narrative storytelling.
Setting that problem aside, the film is a rousing drama, creating a number of stereotypical blacks initially at odds with one another before bringing them together into the fold. There’s the Boston-educated intellectual, the dim ex-slave, and most interestingly, the rebel (Denzel Washington), who, if this were a 1970s radical leftist film, would be the hero, but being a centrist film urging everyone to embrace Uncle Sam, is worn down until he joins hands with his oppressors.
But the most disturbing element to this movie lies in its title. This is a film that glorifies war as the ultimate way of giving meaning to life, as a road to honor and respect, and is filmed, especially in its climactic assault on Fort Wagner, with a beauty and a lack of gore that can easily make the impressionable viewer swoon. And that is a cinematic abyss from which there is no way out.
Topic: What was the last movie you watched? (Read 1526418 times)
