Between the skirmishes there is time out of war around the camp fires, in primitive winter quarters, on visits to sympathetic farmers giving assistance to the Bushwhackers. But the earlier part of the picture is not all fighting.
The 19-year-old Jake has killed 15 men but never made love to a woman, and the final 45 minutes of the picture are about his spiritual healing, partly through the kindly agency of Sue Lee (Jewel), a sensible, twice-widowed woman scarcely more than a year his senior. Only when death ends these commitments can Jake and Holt be liberated. Accompanying him is his new friend, the freed slave Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright), who also out of allegiance to an aristocratic friend has allied himself to the southern cause. As a dazed Jake wanders through the nightmarish horrors being inflicted around him in Lawrence, he becomes aware of the absurdity of the war and and is disgusted by the brutalising effect it has had on him and his comrades in arms. The attack on Lawrence invites comparison with the opening sequence of Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, but Ang Lee never resorts to lyrical slow motion. The raid resulted in the massacre of more than 150 innocent male civilians and the town being put to the torch. The first 90 minutes of Ride With the Devil is a succession of brilliantly staged ambushes and battles, culminating in the appalling massacre on 21 August 1863 when the charismatic madman William Clarke Quantrill led a band of 500 southern guerrillas in an attack on the abolitionist community of Lawrence, Kansas. 'Some friendliness may be lost to your kin,' a Union prisoner tells Jake, and shortly thereafter his father is brutally murdered to pay for the sins of his son.
His father is a Union sympa thiser, but out of friendship for Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet Ulrich), Jake joins a band of Bushwhackers, whose first task it is to avenge the death of Jack's father, a well-off farmer of southern sympathies killed in cold blood by Jayhawkers.
They were a mixed bunch of schoolboys, farmers, idealists, chancers and psychopaths, and riding with them were men who became legendary postwar outlaws, among them the James brothers and the Youngers.Īll of the action is seen from the point of view of Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire), the decent son of a German immigrant. Most of the fighting there was a bloody sideshow, involving irregular guerrilla forces moving rapidly and lethally on horseback, the southerners known as Bushwhackers, the northerners as Jayhawkers.
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