daniel holt character based ride with the devil

She brings food to Roedel’s group, which includes Holt and Roedel’s seriously wounded best friend, Jack Bull Chiles, as they hide out in a crudely built earthen hut. Sue Lee Shelley, played by the singer Jewel, is a young war widow living with her in-laws. During the winter, the bushwhackers break into groups of three or four and hide out on the properties of Southern sympathizers. How characters react to these situations reveal the depth of their prejudices or their capacity for growth and redemption.Įven the film’s Hollywood-required love angle is complex. Some of the film’s most complex and poignant scenes involve Holt finding himself in situations where a black man is not normally found: drinking whiskey with white men, sitting at the same dinner table with a family of Southern sympathizers, having his wounds tended by a young white woman. Holt is a real outsider because he is black man fighting with the Confederates out of personal loyalty to George Clyde, played with swashbuckling dash by Simon Baker, the man who bought him and gave him his freedom and his friendship. The scenario is made even more complex by Roedel’s growing respect for the film’s other principal protagonist, Daniel Holt, portrayed with quiet dignity and smoldering strength by Jeffrey Wright. While the story is told primarily through the eyes of bushwhacker Jacob Roedel, played with engaging naiveté by Tobey Maguire, the narrative is not encumbered by Lost Cause hagiography, since Lee complicates Roedel’s character by making him a bit of an outcast as the son of a Unionist German immigrant.

But his method invites the viewer to evolve along with his youthful characters, learning slowly and painfully, as they do, about the complexities of love, fidelity, honor, responsibility, sacrifice and courage. Ang’s pacing, for the most part, is slow and deliberate, sometimes too much so. Those seeking a fast-paced, battle-filled epic are advised to look elsewhere. Filled with nuanced performances by a cast of up-and-coming actors, Lee again brings complicated social issues of the day down to the realm of interpersonal relationships in order to examine human motivations and actions under stressful conditions. Yet that is just what he offers in the sumptuously photographed, deftly understated film Ride With the Devil. It may seem curious that director Ang Lee would follow up his critically acclaimed movie The Ice Storm, an exposé of middle-class suburban social dysfunction, with a morally complex coming-of-age tale set during the “dirty war” between Confederate bushwhackers and Union jayhawkers that raged across the tall grass prairies of Missouri and Kansas during the Civil War.

Daniel holt character based ride with the devil