Zachary Treitz's Men Go to Battle has been dismissed as Civil War mumblecore, but I found it to be an auspicious debut. The film was made for peanuts and has the expected defects: murky cinematography, dance troupes and reenactors ambling through to save the producers a buck, sub-monophonic sound, but Treitz makes even the defects signify. Sound and vision are appropriately reflective of a world where the protagonist brothers are adrift and in peril. Some critics seemed to expect the characters to have dialogues like the New England Brahmins of A Quiet Passion or their learned Southern counterparts in The Beguiled, but these are illiterate Kentuckians who can barely stammer pleasantries about the weather.
The cast is variable, but never jarringly bad. Timothy Morton as the beset upon Henry Mellon carries the movie with downtrodden aplomb. Treitz often tracks ahead of him, emphasizing Morton's dour face as he marches ever forward into one calamity after another. Men Go to Battle is not revelatory cinema, but it is honest and decent within its limits.
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