The father of the country has not yet arrived, and the young man standing in his place is a genuine creation.
Critics have dismissed Young Washington as hagiography, a marble idol buffed for the country’s 250th, and that is the one thing it is not. What director Jon Erwin has made is smaller and more human: the story of a hungry, status-starved provincial clawing at a social order content to leave him a tenant farmer. The father of the country has not yet arrived, and the young man standing in his place is a genuine creation.
Erwin wrings a surprising amount of scale from a modest purse. More sturdy than distinguished, the craft is handsome where it counts, and when the muskets crack in the tree line, it puts you in the dirt with the men. William Franklyn-Miller plays the wounded pride with a real smolder, a shade too matinee-smooth for the pigtailed icon but alive in the part. The veterans give the picture its ballast. Ben Kingsley’s Dinwiddie is all sly and bored contempt; Andy Serkis blusters magnificently as Braddock; Kelsey Grammer lends Lord Fairfax the ease of a man who has never once doubted his place in the world.
The film’s hinge is the surrender at Fort Necessity. Franklyn-Miller’s major has ignored the warning to retreat, certain he knows the ground better than the men who tried to tell him. Cornered in a swampy bowl he chose himself, his powder soaked, he signs the French articles in a language he cannot read, putting his name, though he does not know it, to a confession that he assassinated a French officer. It is the film’s finest stretch, because it lets him be plainly, disastrously wrong and lets the cost stand. I admired the nerve of it.
It does the harder thing, too. The film knows where its hero’s hunger comes from: the father dead too soon, the schooling forfeited, the half brother Lawrence, his only father figure, reminding him that the chips are stacked against a colonial who will be credited with nothing. When Washington comes home from that defeat to learn that Lawrence has died, he breaks, and for a moment the whole reckoning is on his face: the defeat, the grief, the ambition that has cost him everything and won him nothing. Erwin has found the wounded, resentful man beneath the monument, and he pays the toll honestly. The mistakes leave marks. The lessons are bought with real coin.
Still, Erwin reads Washington’s wounds forward, toward the leader they will produce. The grief is genuine and then it is useful; the humiliation is felt and then it is instructive; every hurt, having been honestly suffered, is gathered up into the making of the man. This is not sanitizing, and it is not evasion. It is a temperament tilted toward outcome, more curious about what the ambition built than about the ambition itself, that raw, unlovely hunger to be more than the world would let him be. The film shows us the wound and, almost in the same breath, its purpose. What it seldom allows is for the wound simply to be a wound.
There is another way, the one Young Mr. Lincoln found long ago: a portrait that mythologizes without apology and still trusts the melancholy to hang over its hero unexplained, a weather that never lifts and never resolves into a lesson. That willingness to leave something at the center of a great man unaccounted for is the harder magic, and it has nothing to do with budget or spectacle. It is a matter of holding one’s nerve before the mystery.
None of which should keep anyone home. Young Washington returns a stone founder to flesh and blood, and it does so with skill and real feeling, made without a flicker of irony by people who believe in their subject. We are badly short of films that believe in anything at all, and a nation needs heroes. This is a good one, and word that a sequel is already under way is welcome news. I only wish the film had left a little more of the man inside the marble unexplained.