Pharaoh's Army

This is one of my personal favorites, a rare little gem that seems to be undiscovered by the general population. Chris Cooper and Patricia Clarkson form the heart of the piece in what is a well-chosen cast. Few movies have ever captured the true hostilities that undergirded the Civil War, but this one seems to capture all the right tones and moods. If you're a fan of the book, Cold Mountain, try this movie out and see if you don't think it makes a good companion piece.

If you're even mildly interested in the War between the States, this film is worth watching. It is great historical story telling. No flashing sabres, no cavalry charges, no carnage -- just the story of a sorry group of Union soldiers stumbling into the farm of a Confederate woman and her son and taking as much as their captain's conscience allows. This quantity moves up and down as events unfold affecting his sense of humanity in conflict with his sense of duty to his men and his cause. Ultimately, he reaches a compromise that any of us would be hard put to top.

I appreciate the historical treatment of the war in Kentucky, a slave state that tried to stay neutral but eventually opted to remain in the Union under mysterious political circumstances involving the detention of certain legislators. Roughly half the soldiers from Kentucky fought for each side, but there's never been much treatment of what it was like to have lived there through those times. This film makes a great contribution simply in the "look and feel" of the time and place.

Pharoah's Army is a rare, realistic view of the American Civil War, which, like all wars, mostly happened "somewhere else". While almost all war movies focus on that "somewhere else", the pinpoints of battle and battlefields, this one courageously covers the other ninety per cent of the war, in the hills and countryside far from sweeping drama.

The director's gift for understatement and getting complex emotions across without phoney speeches give it almost a documentary feel, as does his willingness to let the late autumn Appalachians have their own beauty, without staging or drawing attention to it.

His most courageous choice was making the characters normal people: neither evil nor noble, just people, in a hopeless, hurtful time. The actors are incredibly powerful, all of them, down to the dog and the mule.

People who know little about the American Civil War, and the scar it left on American society -- still deep in the national psyche, even today -- may find the movie thin; the director assumes viewers are well-informed on these points, and doesn't do any "teaching" on them. But Pharoah's Army is one of the best of its genre, and a badly needed perspective that few other directors have explored. It certainly commanded my attention, from start to finish.

Hidden gem here.

This is a war film, and it gives us the best of all worlds in film making.

However, I don't want to build it up too much. It's best to be somewhat pleasantly surprised, like I was.

It gives us the old fashioned war film, with a focus on an isolated group of soldiers. Here, it is the Civil War, and the soldiers are on a patrol to confiscate food for their army from Confederate sympathizers.

My initial feeling is that the characters are too three dimensional for most of IMDb's bubble boy posters. For the rest of the world, I dare say this story would envelop them in a world they could believe existed.

The cinematography is outstanding. The scenery is powerful. Everything about this film is amazing. I'd nominate everyone from cue card holder up for an Academy Award.

I'll echo what others have said. The characters look true to the times. Not like 20th or 21st century actors in uniform between video games. This is the real deal. I also like the way the accents were moderate, more Kentucky than the recent push to turn Kentucky into Mississippi. This was the "neutral" state of the Civil War. Historically, and geographically, it has never been the South, but more of the meeting of North and South.

I won't tell more of the plot, because I think you should take the ride. Trust these reviews. I don't think this film can possibly get a bad review, unless it's from a jealous competitor.

Without giving away the story, it's a pretty deep film on many levels from pain, to to hate to revenge and retribution to entitlement and remembering and forgetting all the reasons why we hate certain people in the first place.

Top class acting by Chris Cooper and Patricia Clarkson. Also very great performances by Kris Kristofferson and Richard Tyson. A film worth seeing and perhaps even, learning from.