Main Cast: Skeet Ulrich, Tobey Maguire, Jewel, Jeffrey Wright, Simon Baker, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, James Caviezel
Release Year: 1999
Country: US
Run Time: 138 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
A complex tale of uneasy alliances along the Kansas/Missouri border during the Civil War, Ride with the Devil concerns Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet Ulrich), a proud son of the South ready to fight for the Confederate cause after his father is killed by Union troops. Chiles's best friend, Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire), joins the Bushwhackers, a group of renegade Southerners aligned with the Confederate Army, even though his family supports the Union cause. The two young men, used to the slow pace and gracious lifestyle of the South's privileged class, are soon confronted with the chaos of battle. Their comrades include valiant leader Black John (James Caviezel), paranoid madman Pitt (Jonathan Rhys Myers), Southern gentleman George (Simon Baker), and Daniel (Jeffrey Wright), a slave from George's plantation. The Bushwhackers hide out in a barn near the home of Sue Lee (singer/songwriter/poet Jewel, in her film debut), a pregnant widow whose husband died in battle three weeks after their marriage. Roedel and Sue Lee begin a chaste romance, but it remains to be seen if the war will permit them to stay together. Adapted from the novel Woe to Live On by Daniel Woodrell, Ride with the Devil was directed by Ang Lee, whose previous project was a very different look at America's past, the 1970s domestic drama The Ice Storm (1997). ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
This superb character study of Confederate guerilla raiders during the U.S. Civil War is yet another feather in the creative cap of director Ang Lee and his frequent collaborator, screenwriter/producer James Schamus. Lee's works may seem on the surface quite disparate, but just as in his previous films, themes recur here of societal divisions clashing until matriarchal forces triumph over the prevailing-but-crumbling patriarchy. In this case, it's the conflict between rich and poor, free and slave, violent and idealistic, as protagonist Jake (Tobey Maguire) wrestles with the feminine pull of home and family represented by Sue Lee (Jewel Kilcher) versus the male-dominated war he's fighting, one that's increasingly morally compromised and hopeless. As in all of Lee's work, even the supporting characters contain multiple shades of gray and complex nuances (it doesn't get much more intricate than Jeffrey Wright's slave fighting for the Confederacy). Performances are uniformly excellent with, surprisingly, folksinger Jewel a particularly luminous and compelling presence in her screen debut. Although Ride With the Devil (1999) did not receive the warm box-office reception Lee often enjoys, it's a successful, highly recommendable costume drama that serves as a stark, estimable companion to the director's earlier period piece, Sense and Sensibility (1995). ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide
Steve Arnold - Art Director, Anne Carey - Associate Producer, Avy Kaufman - Casting, Marit Allen - Costume Designer, Robert Huberman - First Assistant Director, Ang Lee - Director, David R. Ellis - Second Unit Director, Tim Squyres - Editor, David Linde - Executive Producer, Mychael Danna - Composer (Music Score), Alex Steyermark - Musical Direction/Supervision, Frederick Elmes - Camera Operator, Mark Friedberg - Production Designer, Robert F. Colesberry - Producer, James Schamus - Producer, Ted Hope - Producer, Stephanie Carroll - Set Designer, Steve Lauberth - Set Designer, Jonathan Scott - Set Designer, Drew Kunin - Sound/Sound Designer, Philip Stockton - Sound Editor, James Schamus - Screenwriter, Michael Benson - Second Unit Camera, Daniel Woodrell - Book Author
Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire) and Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet Ulrich) are friends in Missouri when the Civil War starts. Jack Bull's father is killed by KansasUnionjayhawkers. The two boys join the Missouri irregulars known as "bushwhackers" or "border ruffians" – informal units loyal to Missouri, not willing to fight someone else's war in Virginia. They meet George Clyde (Simon Baker) and former slave Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright), whom Clyde granted his freedom. They battle using guerrilla tactics and hide out during the winter months.
Jack and Sue Lee (Jewel), widowed daughter-in-law to the man that is hiding them, become lovers. When Jack dies of gangrenous wounds received during a skirmish, Jake escorts Sue Lee south to a safe farm. Following the deaths of a number of female relatives and wives of the guerrillas in the collapse of a make-shift prison where they were being held by Union forces, the bushwhackers, led by William Quantrill, raid Lawrence, Kansas. In the midst of the raid a quarrel arises between Jake and fellow bushwacker Pitt Mackeson (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers). Jake, a German American was born in Germany but emigrated to the United States when he was very young, had suffered from periodical anti-German suspicion from other Southerners, because the German population in Missouri was largely sympathetic to the Union. His semi-affectionate nickname "Dutchie" ("Dutch" was the Anglo-American reinterpretation of Deutsch) was derived from Roedel's German ethnic background. The most virulent anti-German hostility came from Mackeson who shot Jake in the leg shortly after the raid on Lawrence, Kansas and while retreating from a counter-attack of Union forces. This anti-German prejudice made Jake apparently more sympathetic to the prejudice faced by the African American Daniel Holt, who was fighting with Rebel forces as a scout in part out of a personal debt of mutual friendship to a white comrade that had stood by his side before the war.
In the meantime Sue has had Jack's daughter. Both a wounded Holt and Jake recover at the same home that took in Sue. Under pressure from the family who mistakenly thinks the child is Jake's, he marries Sue in a good natured semi-shotgun marriage. Jake gives up being a bushwacker and takes his new family to California. Holt tells them that he will help them get by the Indians in the Nations before he leaves to look for his own family. On the way they meet Pitt again. In a tense standoff Pitt tells of their mutual friends who were hanged in Dover, Missouri, and in a roundabout way Pitt tells of his intentions to meet a similar fate in his nearby hometown, because he intends to go into town and have a drink. Afterwards Jake and Sue Roedel leave for California while Daniel Holt leaves for Texas to find his mother.
Singer Jewel was cast because director Ang Lee felt that she had "period teeth".[citation needed]
The scenes of the Quantrill's Raid on Lawrence, Kansas were filmed in Pattonsburg, Missouri. Pattonsburg was flooded out during the Great Flood of 1993, and the town was relocated leaving the empty buildings and homes available.
The film was intended to be a summer blockbuster, costing over US$35 million to produce. However, despite majority positive reviews by film critics it received negative press after screenings because of the portrayal of a Black Confederate guerrilla by Jeffrey Wright in a role based on Free Black John Noland who rode with Confederate raider Quantrill.
Controversy surrounding events depicted in the film is at odds with the factual nature of guerrilla warfare in Missouri during the Civil War. Historical accounts, such as Jasper County, Missouri in the Civil War (1923) by Col. Ward L. Schrantz, document the warfare depicted in the film.
The film was released on around 140 screens in the U.K. for a limited run and made barely over £100,000. It was then released without any promotion on eight U.S. screens for a limited run of only three days (January 20-22, 2000) fetching only $64,000.
The scheduled home video release of the movie was delayed four months so the distributor could alter the cover art and remove Jeffrey Wright's image from the front video and DVD and as of 2003 had yet to turn a profit.
