Men Go To Battle (now on video)

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Apparently the slam on MEN GO TO BATTLE has become, for those critics who even noticed it, “mumblecore Civil War.” Yes, guess the inarticulate, no-budget aesthete isn’t just for dull romantic comedies set in and around film schools any more.

But that snarky classification would do a slight injustice to director Zachary Treitz’ debut feature. The okay production actually put me more in mind of famously micro-budget 1961 Oscar-winning short A TIME OUT OF WAR. That film wowed the Academy at the time with the notion that the War Between the States could be distilled into one little, violence-free vignette that probably cost less than the boots used in John Huston’s famously overbudget THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE.

With its average-man’s POV of the Civil War, MEN GO TO BATTLE is set in 1861 rural Kentucky, where the semi-literate Mellon brothers half-heartedly maintain the nonproductive family farm – when they’re not trying to just sell it off and be done - amidst horseplay and no particular interest in the big fight between the Union and the Confederacy.