Union

Set during the Civil War, Union follows a woman as she disguises herself as her dead brother to survive within the Confederate army’s ranks – with the character eventually agreeing to marry a widow to save her from an arranged coupling. It’s a fairly intriguing setup that’s employed to disastrously inert and uninvolving effect by Whitney Hamilton, as the filmmaker, working from her own ponderous (and pompous) script, delivers an excessively deliberate narrative that’s been packed with a whole host of needless subplots and digressions – with the lack of focus ensuring that the relationship between the aforementioned women, which is admittedly fairly interesting and well done, is crushed beneath the weight of a ludicrously overstuffed screenplay (ie the film, at a patently absurd 135 minute running time, is in dire need of some aggressive streamlining). The arms-length atmosphere is heightened and perpetuated by Hamilton’s penchant for questionable and often eye-rollingly pretentious elements (eg an astonishing overuse of slow motion, an ongoing reliance on Malickian shots of nature, etc), and it’s clear, certainly, that the writer/director’s attempts at eliciting an emotional reaction from the viewer fall consistently flat. The end result is an endeavor that might’ve worked as a 15 minute short but feels absolutely endless in its current state, which is a shame, really, given the inherent potential inherent within the contemporary, relevant premise.

* out of ****