by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime movie was a lumbering production
called Deliverance Creek, heavily hyped
because it was not only based on a story written by blockbuster romance
novelist Nicholas Sparks but made by his production company (though it’s hard
to tell whether Sparks had anything to do with actually constructing the story
for this because Melissa Carter is listed as the only credited writer on
imdb.com, with Jon Amiel as director). My only previous experience with the work
of Nicholas Sparks is the film version of his novel Nights in
Rodanthe, which has actually been shown on
Lifetime several times but which I actually bought on DVD, mainly because my
hero Christopher Meloni was in it as the second lead (as the cheating husband
the heroine, played by Diane Lane, leaves, thereby making herself available for
a rebound affair with disgraced doctor Richard Gere — it doesn’t sound like
much in synopsis but it was actually pretty good within the limits of the
romance genre, and having Meloni
and Viola Davis in the supporting cast didn’t hurt either!), but on the basis
of Deliverance Creek I suspect
Sparks is a decent writer dealing with contemporary reality but is totally at
sea trying to create historical fiction. Deliverance Creek takes place in 1863, at about the midpoint of the
U.S. Civil War, and it’s centered around the efforts of Deliverance Creek,
Missouri landowner (her place is described throughout the dialogue as a “ranch”
but it looked like an ordinary farm to me) Belle Gatlin Barlowe (Lauren
Ambrose, who deserves kudos for bringing some semblance of credibility to a part whose writers
wrote her all over the moral, emotional and psychological map) to maintain her
land and keep her three kids fed, clothed, sheltered and alive in the face of
relentless pressures from both sides.
The film actually opens in Kansas, where
a band of Confederate irregulars (today they’d be called “unlawful combatants”
and they’re described later as part of the band organized by William Quantrill,
which launched the outlaw careers of Jesse and Frank James) disguised in Union
uniforms ambushes a genuine Union unit and massacres them all — except for a
man who spares his own life by telling them that a shipment of gold is about to
arrive at a bank in Deliverance Creek, Missouri to be used to pay the Union
soldiers, and if the Confederates can steal that gold they can not only fatten
their own war coffers but destabilize the Union army because the soldiers that
were expecting to get paid won’t be. The Confederates are led by Belle’s
brother Jasper Gatlin (Christopher Backus) but also include a psycho who cuts
off their informant’s ears on the spot because he didn’t hear the most
important part of the information: when the gold payroll will arrive. The bank it’s arriving at is owned by
matriarch Cordelia Crawford (Katherine Willis) and her sons Ben (Joel
Johnstone) and Jeb (Barry Tubb); Jeb is a Union commander looking for Jasper
and convinced that Belle is shielding him — which she is; he arrived wounded by
a Union bullet and she hid him out, removed the bullet herself and is letting
him and his band stay there while he recuperates — though when she receives
word a Union raiding party is about to come to her farm to search for them, she
tells the healthy ones to leave and hides Jasper in her cellar. The cellar is a
quite popular place because it’s also being used by Belle’s sister Hattie
(Caitlin Custer) to hide the members of a slave family she’s helping to escape.
One of the slaves, Moses Washington (Tishuan Scott), is an ordinary field hand
who’s later captured by the Confederates, who whip and torture him just for the
hell of it, but his wife (they weren’t officially married but they “jumped the
broomstick”) Kessie (Yaani King) is a house servant who knows how to read and
write, and also figured out how to steal the key to her master’s safe so she
could steal money and his seal, along with paper and ink she used to forge a
set of papers declaring herself free. I’ll say one thing for Sparks and Carter;
they’ve created a set of characters with believably mixed motives that don’t
neatly fall into “hero” or “villain” categories — Kessie is virtually the only
person in the story, white or Black, who’s totally sympathetic — but they’ve
also enmeshed these people in so many different story lines and plot threads
it’s difficult to figure out moment-by-moment just what this movie is supposed to be about.
Eventually the
Union raiding party shoot and kill Belle’s oldest child, her son Caleb (Judah
Lewis, who looks in his mid-teens instead of the character’s stated age of 12)
after messing up her place in what seems to be gratuitous throwing their weight
around (do they really think
they’re going to find a Confederate fugitive literally hiding in a bread box?), since they see him coming
down the stairs wearing Jasper’s spurs (a gift from Jasper earlier) and assume
he’s Jasper. This propels Belle into seeking her revenge against the Crawfords
by joining the Confederates’ plan to rob their bank — which she insists will happen
her way, by having the local
pro-Southern whores steal the Crawfords’ keys long enough for Kessie to make
impressions and then having the robbers tunnel through the nearby
saloon/whorehouse (where on the night of the robbery there’s a colossal
distraction as both Union and Confederate forces seek to use the bar — and
presumably the whores as well — and they confront each other, with the
Confederates holding forth with “Dixie” until the Union commander holds a gun
to the bar pianist’s head and forces him to play “The Battle Hymn of the
Republic” — obviously Sparks and
Carter modeled this preposterous scene on the famous “Marseillaise” sequence in
Casablanca and fell far, far
short of their model) so they can break into the bank, open the vault, steal
the money and sneak out again in the cover of darkness with no one the wiser
and no one getting killed or needing to fire a gun. Only Cordelia Crawford
catches on because at the last minute she has the vault changed from a key lock
to a combination, and just in case the robbers get in anyway (and guess who
figures it out? It’s Kassie, a.k.a. Superblack, who teaches herself
safe-cracking in the nick of time; in case you’re wondering why she’s helping
the Confederates it’s because she’s hoping that her share of the bank loot will
be enough to buy her whole family’s legal freedom) she stations Ben Crawford
with a gun behind the vault to shoot anyone who breaks in. But it’s the robbers
who get the first shot and Ben falls dead — which leaves Belle in a stew of mixed
loyalties since he’s the brother of the man who killed her son, but he’s also
the boyfriend of her sister and
he’s risked his life to help fugitive slaves escape. (I’ll say one thing for Deliverance
Creek: it’s one U.S. Civil War movie that
says unambiguously that slavery was bad.)
Deliverance Creek seems less like a self-contained movie and more like
the opening chapter of a serial — it ends pretty inconclusively, with the
Confederates getting the bank loot out of town by hiding it in wooden coffins
ostensibly containing the bodies of smallpox victims and Belle left alone on
the farm with her two remaining kids, the ex-boyfriend who was actually Caleb’s
father even though her own dad forced her to marry someone else (and who, of
course, still wants her) and a bunch of Union soldiers sniffing around her
place because she was wearing a chain with a ring through it around her neck,
and director Amiel cuts ominously from a Union soldier finding it at the scene
of the robbery (ah, a Clue!) to
Belle feeling around her neck and discovering it missing. Deliverance
Creek might actually work as a series — at
least the hour-long format of conventional episodic television would force
Sparks and whatever writers are assisting (or ghosting for) him on this project
to confine themselves to one or, at most, two storylines per episode — but as a
stand-alone TV-movie it’s a woeful failure, giving us not only way too many
plot lines to follow but nobody (aside from Kessie) to root for. It’s nice to
be reminded that the Civil War was a morally ambiguous struggle when it was
occurring and people took up arms for one side or the other for reasons that
had little to do with the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the South’s “peculiar
institution” and the “states’ rights” dogma the Southerners came up with to
justify it — and even the people who were doing the “right” thing by our
modern-day standards were often doing it for personal or financial reasons that
blow the whole image of the Civil War as a brutal struggle fought over High Moral
Principles. But one would think that artists as different as Bruce Catton and
Ken Burns (from whose Civil War
documentary the makers of Deliverance Creek copied the gimmick of having a scratchy solo violin
be their main musical instrument) had made that point already!
