‘General Orders No. 9’ – The defeat of history at the hands of modernity.

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Folks turned off by Terrence Malick’s life-death-and-the-cosmos treatise Tree of Life and looking for a rural, low-country Southern rendition should look no further than General Orders No. 9. The title refers to Robert E. Lee’s order to surrender to the Union army and end the Civil War. This pseudo-documentary is about defeat as well. The defeat of history at the hands of modernity.

For all of its maps, lines, aged images, scenic detours, lush photography and rugged-throated folklorish histrionics, General Orders No. 9 is a dark rumination on the death knell of the way things were, the cold-shouldered encroachment of interconnected, congested urban life on wilds of the South’s agrarian, more solitary past.

Using the Native American history, county lines and city seats of the state of Georgia as as examples of the evolution of human civilization, writer-director Robert Persons has created a wholly unique, though flawed, cinematic experience.

Now, anyone in Baton Rouge has a dubious relationship to the interstate, but Persons delves deeper into its effect than a 5 o’clock face palm in bumper-to-bumper congestion. A former co-worker once asked, quite honestly, if city officials could detonate the stretch of 1-10 that towers over the University and City Lakes. General makes it, if not a villain, at least an accomplice in the destruction of a more nature-dependent America for which Persons still longs.

It’s not about the future, it’s about a longing for the past. Maybe Persons’ intention, with his laser-like focus on the importance of town square courthouses and the weather vanes that top them, was to have an entire generation of Southern urban planners stop and think about why they are doing what they are doing. Are people more detached from nature? What effect does that have? What place does nostalgia have in modern planning, transportation and architecture.

Those who haven’t experienced the great outdoors to any great degree are likely to be shocked to attention. Those who’ve spent any amount of time off the beaten path in Louisiana know much of Person’s Georgian cinematography is beautiful yes, but not extraordinary. There are greater and more enchanting vistas than even he finds in the decade or so he says it took to put this film together.

It’s less a documentary, than an abstraction, General is a campfire ramble set to pictures and sound and a grandfatherly speech about what was and what is to come that is a little too long and too repetitive to hold in the highest regards, but respected and seductive nonetheless. The film is Persons’ singular vision, but like any good vision, this one will be polarizing, because it is open to interpretation.