Pursuit of Honor: The Rise of George Washington (review)
2007; Volume: 37; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/flm.2007.0069
ISSN1548-9922
Autores Tópico(s)American History and Culture
ResumoPursuit of Honor:The Rise of George Washington John C. Tibbetts Pursuit of Honor: The Rise of George Washington (2006) Written and directed by Robert Matzen Paladin Communications. (www.gwmovie.net) 85 min While the figure of George Washington looms large in American history, he has been so denatured of vitality and so desaturated of color that only a granite bust of white marble remains in the popular consciousness. Even the bewigged face and form depicted in the famous Gilbert Stuart painting (the 1796 Athenaeum Portrait) dwindle away into a whitened, unfinished expanse of canvas. Filmmakers, meanwhile, have been tiptoeing around the Washington Monument for years. The film adaptation of the Kaufman and Hart play, George Washington Slept Here (1942) reduces the Great Man to only a name, a joke that haunts a dilapidated old inn. And D.W. Griffith's epic America (1924) embalms Saint Washington (Arthur Dewey) into the familiar iconic image of a caped figure kneeling reverently in prayer in the snows of Valley Forge. As a corrective, several recent films have endeavored to fill out the picture, dab in spots of color, and rub in areas of texture. At one extreme is the swashbuckling George Washington, a 3-part television mini-series first broadcast in 1984, starring Barry Bostwick and Patty Duke as George and Martha. More recently we have Pursuit of Honor (2006), an altogether more moderate but compelling revisionist view. Although it lacks the sumptuous production values, romantic exuberance, and dramatic edge of the Bostwick vehicle, it benefits from a tighter focus, a more sober brand of flag-waving, and a stable of historians who comment on the public and private aspects of the man and his times. The action begins in the mid-1750s, when the 23-year old Colonel George Washington is fighting as a British officer in the Seven Years War (the French and Indian Wars). It concludes twenty-five years later in 1775 with General Washington's assumption of the command of the Continental Army. In between is the story of a man who, in the words of the narrator, "played the role of George Washington." Indeed, destiny seems to have beckoned at the outset: As a soldier spared from a fatal bullet from a Native American named Red Hawk in the Allegheny campaigns in 1758, Washington thereafter feels himself a figure anointed by Providence for some larger purpose. "I now exist and appear in the land of the living," he writes later, "by the miraculous care of Providence that protected me beyond all human expectation." And when the rebel Americans call him forth from the Second Continental Congress to take command, he feels that events have at last fulfilled their early promise. The Revolution itself and Washington's tenure as President are beyond the scope of this narrative. Details of Washington's story are familiar, and glimpses of his private life are deftly interwoven into the larger picture of America's birth pangs. His withdrawal from military life after the Treaty of Paris in 1763 and his success as a landowner and gentleman tobacco planter at his beloved Mount Vernon are interlaced with his dashing figure on the dance floor, his courting of the lovely (and wealthy) Martha Custis; his doomed love for the beautiful Sarah Fairfax, wife of his best friend (a still controversial topic that receives especially sensitive handling here); the tragic early death from epileptic seizures of his step-daughter, Patsy Custis; and his efforts at land speculation (claiming for his former soldiers and himself lands promised them by the British). Here is a portrait of a man supremely self-possessed, handsome, imposing of stature, prone to a fiery temper, skilled at fencing and industrious in his agricultural pursuits, disappointed in love, perhaps, but determined to honor his wife and step-children. "And yet, the flow of history would not release George Washington." That solemn narrative voice on the soundtrack thus occasionally redirects our attention to the bigger issues at hand, politics, revolution, and slavery. Politics for him is a kind [End Page 77] of thief in the night, stealthily pilfering the hardware while he's looking the other way. His political allegiance to the British...
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