The Miami Herald from Miami, Florida • 85

WEEKEND Glory: fall of irony great moments The great moments in Glory are many and were created by director Edward Zwick (he made About Last Night and is of thirtysomething) along conventional but no less affecting lines Glory is a film of big muscular scenes in battle sequences in intimate confrontations in parades of the 54th The combat scenes are particularly well-staged and have about them the great rumble the smoke of chaos and the terrible mix of joy and horror that amount to war in good Hollywood hands Glory hits you and hits you again You come away unfazed Performances are both the strength and weakness Washington is excellent: His rebellious streak offers a counterweight to the worship of war and a striking figure in any case Freeman has a more familiar and less provocative role in another context he would be an Uncle Tom but he in turn balances Washington though not fully and hence not too much On the other hand Broderick is weak in the role of Shaw the commander not really his fault He looks and acts the part of a colonel barely out of college But voice which must be raised frequently in a film such as this is that of a preteen Like Michael Fox in Casualties of War he simply have the weight of a Hollywood hero For all guts and fury it flinches from that second irony Its central premise is that these strong black men will earn respect only by submitting to that hoary Hollywood convention: the character-building force of military training The falsehood in this is perhaps another film altogether But Glory leaves you with not just the sense of its triumph over injustice but their destruction by the very system that empowered them to begin with no escaping that story either even if Glory really tell it By BILL COSFORD Herald Movie Critic A great irony of the American Civil War was that American blacks freed slaves runaways and northern free men were widely regarded among Union supporters in the early years at least as unfit for combat duty against the South Another is that it would take the deaths of many blacks for them to gain the status as fellow humans that the war was supposedly about at least after the Emancipation Proclamation Glory a stirring movie about heroism and men under fire addresses both questions the first frontally and the second only indirectly It's the story of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry one of a number of all-black regiments led by white officers that were formed during the war and ultimately to fight On the first irony at least Glory is a splendid comment and a fine film The 54th was raised largely from free New England blacks and commanded by Robert Gould Shaw son of a prominent family of white abolitionists who was 25 at the time Shaw (played here by Matthew Broderick in a spasm of miscasting) wrote a worth of letters home they provide the factual underpinning for Kevin screenplay which takes a number of forgivable liberties with history but seems ultimately true to it What Shaw got for his beliefs was a few hundred untrained and largely undisciplined men whose zeal for the cause would eventually be tempered if not blunted altogether by ihe contempt in which they were held by the Union officer corps It fell to Shaw to see that the men received shoes which were withheld from them by casually racist quartermasters then equal pay which was initially denied them by Congress and finally the opportunity to fight which was the toughest trick of all But Glory is not another of those movies that sees a formative black HEROIC INTENTIONS: Sharts (Jihmi Kennedy) Trip (Denzel Washington) and Rawlins (Morgan Freeman) prepare for Civil War duty in Glory American experience through white eyes truly about the soldiers themselves as played by a fine ensemble cast led by Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington Freeman and Washington are the yin and yang of the story Freeman is the mature even resigned figure who will of course become a leader of his men and Washington has the role of the brooding rebel who sees the fight as just another obstacle thrown up before his manhood The film say it but one further irony is that character was proven right by history: The 54th fought and died heroically in 1863 throwing themselves against the heavily defended fortress at Fort Wagner near Charleston SC but it would be another 90 years before blacks were fully integrated into the US military And then to trump the irony it would be blacks who would be drafted would Cast: Matthew Broderick Denzel Washington Morgan Freeman Cary Elwes Andre Braugher Jihmi Kennedy Director: Edward Zwick Producer: Freddie Fields Screenwriter: Kevin Jarre based on letters by Robert Gould Shaw Lay This Laurel by Lincoln Kirstein and One Gallant Rush by Peter Burchard Cinematographer: Freddie Francis Music: James Horner A Tri-Star Pictures release Running time: minutes Vulgar language violence gore fight and would die in far greater numbers than their percentage of the population warranted in the war in Vietnam at just the time when the struggle for civil rights was aflame again home 122 back SUSPICIOUS Internal Affairs stars Andy Garcia above as a detective who becomes convinced that street cop Richard Gere is involved in criminal activities Driving Miss Daisy moves at leisurely pace MOVIE REVIEW DRIVING MISS DAISY (PG) Cast: Jessica Tandy Morgan Freeman Dan Aykroyd Patti LuPone Esther Rolle Director: Bruce Beresford Producers: Richard Zanuck Lili Finl Zanuck Screenwriter: Alfred Uhry based on his play Cinematographer: Peter James Music: Hans Zimmer A Warner Bros release Running time: 100 minutes Brief vulgar language ish for instance not exactly unprecedented in a major city of the post-war South but unusual enough so that we know the two will be linked by some event that suggests to each the near-universality of prejudice The event arrives on schedule big contribution with the help of Alfred Uhry who adapted his own play for the screen is that he allows the violent agent of revelation to occur offscreen Driving Miss Daisy unfolds at a leisurely pace with great attention to period detail and character-aging makeup effects (These are least useful on Dan Aykroyd who plays son and who never appears or acts more convincing than a bloated version of the actor back in his TV-skit days) occasionally quite funny and relentlessly good-hearted And never ever does it whack you over the head with its theme And OK too Given the earnest but determinedly unstartling formula the blow might not be noticed slow-burning combination a kind of comedic crock pot proud stubborn and impossibly picky proud too but smart enough to hide it and patient enough to give one of the major saints pause They bicker and banter and surprise! eventually become the best of friends best about Driving Miss Daisy is watching these two actors work together Tandy coaxing sympathy from a character that is not at all sympathetic Freeman finding dignity in the role Take a step back from the story and realize that the relationship is quite improbable stay inside it and you believe every minute There many developments in the story which takes Miss Daisy and Hoke Colburn through a succession of gleaming vintage cars as well as the shadows of upheaval in the larger life outside their privileged confines that are not completely predictable Daisy is introduced early as Jew FRIDAY JANUARY 12 1990 THE MIAMI HERALD By BILL COSFORD Herald Movie Critic The charms of Driving Miss Daisy Bruce adaptation of the off-Broadway Pulitzer Prize-winner are those small careful ones of the well-made play So are its flaws Happily there are more of the former than of the latter That last sentence is written the way Miss Daisy Werthan might say it a 60-ish Atlanta widow when we meet her and she is proper not to a fault but close white but relatively emancipated which means that in 1948 when the story begins she employs a black cook whom she allows to sass her Gently gently but still Alas Miss Daisy has reached the point in her life at which driving a car is entirely too complicated When she backs her big sedan over a wall and into her landscaped yard she insists that the automobile has Her son knows better and hires a black chauffeur a man to drive PERSISTENT Roger Me filmmaker Michael Moore above pursues General Motors chairman Roger Smith after plant closings affect people in Flint Mich Miss Daisy Miss Daisy want any part of it but as fate and the exigencies of carefully drawn compartmentalized stage plays will have it the arrival of the chauffeur signals the start of a 25-year relationship that will handily reflect the changes in American life over the same time In the two key roles Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman make a delicious -4 5.