Pursuit of Honor: The Rise of George Washington (2006)
Pursuit of Honor: The Rise of George Washington (Written and directed by Robert Matzen, Paladin Communications Production, 2006) While the figure of George Washington looms large in American history, he has been so denatured of vitality and so desaturated of color that only a granitic bust of white marble remains in the popular consciousness. Even the bewigged face and form depicted in the famous Gilbert Stuart painting (the 1796 Athenaeum Portrait) dwindle away into a whitened, unfinished expanse of canvas. Filmmakers, meanwhile, have been tiptoeing around the Washington Monument for years. The film adaptation of the Kaufman and Hart play, George Washington Slept Here (1942) reduces the Great Man to only a name, a joke that haunts a dilapidated old inn. And D.W. Griffith’s epic America (1924) embalms Saint Washington (Arthur Dewey) into the familiar iconic image of a caped figure kneeling reverently in prayer in the snows of Valley Forge.
As a corrective, several recent films have endeavored to fill out the picture, dab in spots of color, and rub in areas of texture. At one extreme is the swashbuckling George Washington, a 3-part television mini-series first broadcast in 1984, starring Barry Bostwick and Patty Duke as George and Martha (no relation to the Albee play!). More recently we have Pursuit of Honor (2006), an altogether more moderate but compelling revisionist view. Although it lacks the sumptuous production values, romantic exuberance, and dramatic edge of the Bostwick vehicle, it benefits from a tighter focus, a more sober brand of flag-waving, and a stable of historians who comment on the public and private aspects of the man and his times.
The action begins in the mid-1750s, when the 23-year old Colonel George Washington is fighting as a British officer in the Seven Years War (the French and Indian Wars). It concludes twenty-five years later in 1775 with General Washington’s assumption of the command of the Continental Army. In between is the story of a man who, in the words of the narrator, “played the role of George Washington.” Indeed, destiny seems to have beckoned at the outset: As a soldier spared from a fatal bullet from a Native American named Red Hawk in the Allegheny campaigns in 1758, Washington thereafter feels himself a figure anointed by Providence for some larger purpose. “I now exist and appear in the land of the living,” he writes later, “by the miraculous care of Providence that protected me beyond all human expectation.” And when the rebel Americans call him forth from the Second Continental Congress to take command, he feels that events have at last fulfilled their early promise. The Revolution itself and Washington’s tenure as President are beyond the scope of this narrative.
Details of Washington’s story are familiar, and glimpses of his private life are deftly interwoven into the larger picture of America’s birth pangs. His withdrawal from military life after the Treaty of Paris in 1763 and his success as a landowner and gentleman tobacco planter at his beloved Mount Vernon are interlaced with his dashing figure on the dance floor, his courting of the lovely (and wealthy) Martha Custis; his doomed love for the beautiful Sarah Fairfax, wife of his best friend (a still controversial topic that receives especially sensitive handling here); the tragic early death from epileptic seizures of his step-daughter, Patsy Custis; and his efforts at land speculation (claiming for his former soldiers and himself lands promised them by the British). Here is a portrait of a man supremely self-possessed, handsome, imposing of stature, prone to a fiery temper, skilled at fencing and industrious in his agricultural pursuits, disappointed in love, perhaps, but determined to honor his wife and step-children.
“And yet, the flow of history would not release George Washington.” That solemn narrative voice on the soundtrack thus occasionally redirects our attention to the bigger issues at hand, politics, revolution, and slavery. Politics for him is a kind of thief in the night, stealthily pilfering the hardware while he’s looking the other way. His political allegiance to the British is undermined by opposition to his land speculations in the Ohio country. He finds himself, almost by happenstance, a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. In the aftermath of the Townsend Act of 1765 he and Thomas Jefferson participate in the Articles of Association to boycott the British taxation of imports. He attends the Second Continental Congress. He assumes command of the Continental Army with as much an eye toward the looming figure of Cincinnatus the Roman Farmer/Warrior than revolutionary convictions. And all the while, despite his ownership of dozens of field and house slaves, he begins to question the institution of slavery. More out of the influence of Revolutionary rhetoric and his association with Lafayette and Hamilton than out of any personal convictions, his shifting attitudes toward slavery will result in the freeing of his slaves after his death.
Entering the mix are the voices and on-camera presence of many historians, representative of the American and British academies and institutions such as Colonial Williamsburg (where many of the scenes are shot), Fred Anderson, Peter Heniguez, Patricia Brady, Bruce Egli, Stephen Brumwell, and others. The camera and editing techniques are rather pedestrian, if entirely serviceable, and the music score is an effective pastiche culled from the period tunes and styles of the Age of Enlightenment. The historical episodes—including Washington’s skirmishes in the Allegheny Mountains, his near-death experience crossing the Allegheny River by raft, his desperate defense of Fort Necessity against a superior French force, his negotiations with the French as a British emissary, his labors in the tobacco fields—lack the dash and spectacle of the aforementioned Bostwick version, but they profit from extensive location authenticity, a sparing but effective deployment of re-enactors, and a cast that includes a stalwart Bryan Cunning as Washington, a modest Theresa I. Hune as his wife Martha, a fetching Christine Fallon as his great love, Sally Fairfax, and an appealing young Valerie Sloan as the doomed daughter, Patsy Custis. While lacking a soundtrack of their own, these scenes function as vivid tableaux-vivants that nicely animate the pageant of history.
In sum, Robert Matzen, who seems to have participated in almost every aspect of the production, including writing, directing, and editing, has wrought an agreeable portrait that not only replaces the stereotypes of the marble bust and the sketchy painting with a recognizable figure in a landscape, but which also tempers the effusions of romantic Hollywood.
John C. Tibbetts University of Kansas tibbetts@ku.edu
