Gettysburg.

Gettysburg was conceived as a television film for TNT, but Ted Turner and colleagues apparently decided that this adaptation of Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels was impressive enough for the big screen. They were partly right. It is impressive, but it is an anomaly among big-scale war movies. Absorbing, moving in its intimate moments, Gettysburg is quite routine in its decpiction of combat. Not particularly eye-filling, it nevertheless engages the mind and heart.

Director-writer Robert F. Maxwell's budget appears to have been well spent. I'm not a Civil War buff and can't attest to the movie's accuracy, but for me the feeling of historical otherness, cinema's time machine capability, was well maintained. The period evoked here looks both distant from ours and yet a stepping stone towards ours. Only one or two beards that seemed in need of another coat of spirit gum jolted me back to the present. But is perfect accuracy always desirable? The hugeh square beards and abundant moustaches that the officers part certainly give them the look of Mathew Brady portraits, but it's unnerving to hear actors speak and not see their lips and jaws move.

But no matter how much was spent on assembling these blue and grey armies, the result isn't a unique vision of what happened to them on the battlefield. Here, whenever the bodies of soldiers are thrown into the air by exploding mines or are knocked over by musket fire, they always seem to be taking the same forward dive or sideways crumple. After a while, I began to feel that I was looking at a sort of grisly recycling effort: the same bodies going through the same deathly acrobatics over and over. Missing was the grim idiosyncrasy of violent demise, what John Huston was after in The Red Badge of Courage when he showed a mortally wounded youth groping for his spectacles in the dirt and succeeding in put them back on just before flopping over dead. Only one battlefield moment in Gettysburg is comparable to that and you'll miss it if you blink. The camera passes along a line of soldiers under sporadic fire. they are loading, aiming, ducking, and so forth. But, toward the end of the line, we see a soldier reading a letter. Such a brief moment, yet it speaks eloquently of the boredom that coexists with extreme danger in combat. More moments like these in Gettysburg would have turned eight-hour-a-day movie extras into living individuals caught in the jaws of death.

Yet Gettysburg is cumulatively compelling. I haven't read Shaara's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, but Maxwqell has spoken of it with reverence, and it's apparent that he has tried to preserve some of the depth of a good0 novel's characterizations and to give his actors opportunities to shine. It's also clear that as a writer and director of dialogue scenes, Maxwell is much more incisive and self-demanding than he is as a film tactician of carnage and glory. Not with the thunder of cannons does this movie reverberate but with the voices of men in tents and meadows lifted in argument, complaint, and condolence.

With the exception of Sam Elliot, who looks wonderfully shaggy as the prescient cavalry officer Budford but whose vocal delivery is ridiculous (one bark per sentence), all of the actors with substantial roles fulfill them.

As Longstreet, Lee's second-in-command, Tom Berenger brings off the same sort of triumph Daniel Day-Lewis enjoys in The Age of Innocence: he makes the audience come to him instead of reaching out to them. This reticence perfectly suits the character of a man who always knows his own mind but doesn't always speak it. With its precise employment of unempahatic gestures, commanding silhouette, and subtle vocal inflections, Berenger's performance whispers itself into the consciousness of the viewer.

As that unlikeliest but most likable of Union hereoes, Colonel Chamberlain, that unlikeliest but most likable of leading men, Jeff Daniels, gambles and wins. He risk making the once-and-future university man seem at first to be the same sort of callow academic Daniels played in Terms of Endearment. Then when circumstances put Chamberlain on the spot, Daniels flashes forth the mettle of the man. That the repelled charge on Little Round Top is the most exciting passage of arms in Gettysburg is only partly the result of its being Maxwell's best martial stage. For me, the scene's excitement was chiefly sustained by Daniels communicating the younger officer's amazement at what is being demanded of him and his simultaneous resolve to measure up to the demand.

In smaller roles: Richard Jordan as Lewis, Armisted, epitome of Southern gallantry and sentiment, has an uphill struggle to make a long, meandering speech (expressing love for a boyhood comrade turn foe) cohere. Jordan gets to the top of a soreheaded self-justifier. One of America's best actors, Stephen Lange, has the surprisingly underwritten part of George Pickett. When asked by Longstreet if Pickett can capture an impossible target, Lange reveals all the crazy gallantry of his character in one unforgettable smile of berserk joy. As a (presumably) fictional Irish sergeant, Kevin Conway has the same sort of role Thomas Mitchell used to do the perfection in the '30s and '40s. Conway almost made me forget Mitchell.

Finally, precariously, Martin Sheen as Robert E. Lee. Even if this performance were a failure, it would be an heroic one, for Sheen had to do battle with his own inappropriate physical equipment. Though now in his early fifties, this actor still has a baby face that defies old-age make-up, and a voice that upon occasion (listen to him carefully if you don't believe me) sounds like Michael J. Fox's. But Sheen doesn't fail. He attains Lee's majesty through sheer concentration and imagination. Watch his eyes as he stares at, yet somehow beyond, his officers, as if envisioning horrors looming up on the horizon. Watch his almost maternal gestures as he receives the adulation of his troops while reviewing them and the way he makes Lee appear crushed by so much love even as he returns their blessings. Sheen captures the essence of the Lee that Maxwell wants us to know: a man utterly without ferocity who nevertheless thas the necessary ruthlessmess to send his beloved troops to face death. It is greatly to Maxwell's credit that he could perceive that there was a Lee inside Sheen.

That the moments of human intimacy in this movie are so much finer than its battles somewhat shews what I take to be Shaara's theme, as announced by the title of his book and encapsulated on screen in a speech made by Conway's Irish sergeant. Man is, as Hamlet would have it, "in reason...in faculties...in action how like an angel," but he's a killer angel on the field of battle. The Union man fights for an ideal of liberty, the Confederate for his community and a beloved way of life. And so both destroy their fellow Americans. In this movie, because of pungent dialogue and superb acting, we feell the psychological complexity and moral goodness of these soldiers. But the battles they fight (with the exception of Little Round Table) lack the necessary, veracious savagery. So there is more of the angelic than of the murderous in this version of The Killer Angels.

At any rate, in a few years Gettysburg will nicely survive transmigration to the medium for which it was originally intended. Like most good movies made for the tube, its real fireworks are in the acting rather than its visual design. Angelic killers? Angelic actors.