The life of George Washington was already thoroughly moralized during his lifetime—by which I mean that his life story was turned into what medieval writers called an exemplum, or a story for the moral instruction and edification of his fellow countrymen. From Washington’s life, young American men were supposed to learn what a man, an American man, and a military or national leader ought to be.
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This process has continued down to the present day and is still very much in the background of Jon Erwin’s Young Washington—a fact that Mr. Erwin, to his credit, makes no bones about. He is also to be congratulated for bucking the trend of recent years for denigrating Washington, along with the other Founding Fathers, for owning slaves or expropriating the lands of America’s indigenous people.
But I have mixed feelings about this kind of cinematic hagiography. Movies—as I have had occasion to mention before—are a hyper-realistic medium and, therefore, are poorly adapted for the presentation of anything, such as the life of a saint, which is unusually difficult to make look believably real. And that difficulty is compounded when you also have to make its historical period, now more than 250 years in the past, look believably real to a modern audience.
Thus, when the movie’s young George (William Franklyn-Miller) says to his friend, Christopher Gist (Leo Hanna), who was wounded in the losing battle of Fort Necessity in 1754, “You’re going to be OK,” the cinematic illusion shatters—at least for anyone who knows that the expression “OK” (origin still unknown, though much speculated upon) didn’t come into the language until almost a century later.
More seriously, movie reality invariably asserts itself at the expense of real reality, and even sticklers for historical authenticity like Mr. Erwin cannot avoid the influence of the movie superhero in his portrayal of one who, in his own time, had to be content with being no more than an unqualified hero.
On the other hand, if you’re going to give the movies’ superhero treatment to a real-life person (which I don’t recommend), I can only applaud the choice of George Washington as your subject—a choice that not only rehabilitates the Father of his Country from his 21st-century debunking but also provides a modern audience, with no experience of anything remotely similar, an insight into the 18th-century honor culture that produced him and that, until recently, made the aforesaid debunking all but unthinkable.
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As an extra added bonus, almost everything Young Washington tells us about what was done by and what happened to the youthful Washington in and around the time of the French and Indian War (called the Seven Years’ War during its European phase) is true, bar a few unimportant factual details. And it is another plus for the movie that the story of Washington’s exploits on his country’s then-frontier, known as the Ohio Territory, long before he led its fight for independence from Britain, will be better known than it has been hitherto.
In fact, the movie begins with an even younger George Washington (Will Joseph), age 11, conceiving, on the death of his father and inspired by the military and naval adventures of his older half-brother Lawrence (John Foss), the ambition to become a British officer. But British officers had to buy their commissions in those days, and George didn’t have the money.
So instead he volunteered his services to the Virginia colony’s largest landowner, Lord Fairfax (Kelsey Grammer), to lead an expedition to survey his extensive landholdings in the Ohio wilderness. There he encountered an encroachment by the French on what was considered British territory and was commissioned a major in the Virginia militia and was charged by the British governor Dinwiddie (Ben Kingsley) with delivering his order to the French to get out.
This leads to the debacle at Fort Necessity, in southwestern Pennsylvania, and the start of the French and Indian War. More importantly for George Washington himself, it leads to his redeeming himself by heroic action in subsequent battles with the French and learning the lesson, expressed to him by his mother (Mary-Louise Parker) that “Failure is a tutor sent by God. If you don’t learn from it, you fail twice. If you do learn from it, you’ve earned wisdom.”
It’s an inspirational thought. Oprah, I believe, has said something similar. But it takes us out of the world created by the movie and brings us back to our own with something of a jolt. Perhaps such a bumpy landing could not have been avoided, however, given the movie’s transparently instructional purpose. And, God knows, young Americans today are badly in need of such instruction.
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