Ang Lee's "Ride with the Devil" deals with an aspect of the American Civil War usually ignored by the cinema; not the great battles between the Yankee and Confederate armies but the brutal and bloody skirmishes carried out by those Southern 'gentlemen' and farm boys who didn't join up and this, being an Ang Lee film, is remarkably faithful to the period both in look and in the patina of James Schamus' antiquated dialogue from Daniel Woodrell's novel "Woe to Live On".
Lee cast the film mostly with young actors whose careers had yet to take a foothold, (Tobey Maguire, Skeet Ulrich, Jim Caviezel, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Jeffrey Wright and the singer Jewel who really is excellent), and the pace of the film is certainly measured. The action scenes are indeed bloody and the film's one great set-piece, (an attack on a town by Quantrill's Raiders), is suitably savage but Lee prefers a slow, almost documentary-like approach to his material and the film often goes in directions we don't expect. This is definitely a post-modern western and in the Lee canon it's been largely overlooked but it remains one of his very best pictures, one that makes no concessions to its potential audience. It really is very fine.
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