Review: C.S.A.: Confederate States of America

The film reveals the depressingly thin line between elements of its fantastic setup and authentic American history.

C.S.A.: Confederate States of America
Photo: IFC Films

A satiric rebuke to the prevailing historical stance that the Civil War was fought not over slavery but, rather, over the more encompassing issue of “states rights,” Kevin Willmott’s C.S.A.: Confederate States of America assumes a faux-documentary guise to posit an alternate American reality in which the South was victorious in the “War of Northern Aggression.” Mimicking Ken Burns’s stylistic hallmarks (weighty narration, voiceover readings of letters and official documents, weathered pictures, newsreel footage, and reenactments), Willmott’s cinematic “what if” scenario offers a window onto a nation wedded to antebellum values, the primary one being the systematic subjugation of an African-American population whose forced servitude comes to define the country throughout Reconstruction (dubbed by one commentator “the American Holocaust”) and World War II (in which the country sided with Hitler).

Presented as a British documentary premiering on American television, Willmott’s “program” is a well-crafted ruse, from its clip of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Hunt for Dishonest Abe (a fictional recounting of a defeated Lincoln’s attempt to escape Southern justice, with Harriet Tubman’s help, by donning blackface) to its deft interweaving of real and phony historical figures and archival materials. Occasionally, such manipulation reveals its phony-baloney seams—most glaringly with an amateurish 1940’s RKO movie about President Jefferson Davis’s struggle to reconcile the post-war North and South—and the director’s reliance on only two primary talking heads eventually lends the film a low-budget chintziness at odds with its generally professional PBS-style façade.

However, in the style of Philip Roth’s dense The Plot Against America, Willmott’s counterfeit textbook lesson exhibits a canny aptitude for using its wealth of make-believe details as a prism for our contemporary culture’s continuing legacy of tense racial inequality. In its depiction of the Confederate States’s Cold War with neighboring Canada (the home of abolitionists and suffragists) and its imperialist endeavors in Mexico and South America, C.S.A. confronts our heritage of race and gender-specific intolerance with a forthrightness and biting, black humor that prevents the proceedings from turning dull or didactic. And with its sterling “commercial breaks”—populated by ads for based-in-fact products like “Niggerhair Cigarettes” and “Darky Toothpaste”—the film also reveals the depressingly thin line between elements of its fantastic setup and authentic American history.

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Score: 
 Cast: Evamarii Johnson, Rupert Pate, Larry J. Peterson, Charles Frank  Director: Kevin Willmott  Screenwriter: Kevin Willmott  Distributor: IFC Films  Running Time: 89 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2004  Buy: Video

Nick Schager

Nick Schager is the entertainment critic for The Daily Beast. His work has also appeared in Variety, Esquire, The Village Voice, and other publications.

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