"Wicked Spring" is a love story, left unfulfilled, between a Civil War Soldier and his sweetheart back home. The film opens up with timely folk music and long, simmering shots that pull the viewer back to a time long ago, with no fast moving cars, just trains. The relationship, which seems dreamlike in comparison to the war, is drawn out with no words, almost smearing like chalk pastels.
Once the first words are spoken however, the film does not get much more interesting than that. The first monologue, the girlfriend of Harrison, the benevolent gentleman soldier, is poor in quality. The words seem forced and badly chosen. In fact, most of the dialogue in the film is of this same quality, distracting from attempt to evoke emotion from the viewer.
The shots of the war before morning are very grey and uninteresting. The lack of color seems obviously symbolic of the deprivation, the hunger, the death, the lost love, but it is not done well, and lacks a visual alertness that the film really requires. The sound in they grey scenes is extremely repetitive and contains a rolling bass that is supposed to be like continual gunshot, however seems more like a rumbling stomach. That could have been my own stomach though, starving for content.
If the film was in fact more visually interesting, than its main stream love story plot would be more forgivable. While the emphasis is obviously on the ordinary man, the plot is left much too ordinary to really embrace. A stronger character begins to become defined when the illiteracy of Harrison becomes apparent. However, this is not a focus of the film until after an hour of heaping mounds of grey fighting scenes that could have been done without. I think that the director should have spent more time working on the basic elements of plot and composition before getting carried away with knit-picky things like the historical correctness of the costuming. This film will probably not stand long in the wake of time.
