“Young Washington” is like one of those great-man biographies you read in grade school. Released by Angel Studios for the Fourth of July, the movie is intended as a bit of likably square, neo-traditional, right-wing-adjacent counterprogramming. But say this much for it: In its life-of-an-American-plaster-saint way, Jon Erwin’s coming-of-age military adventure film doesn’t make being George Washington look any easier than it was.
The heart of the movie takes place in 1755, at the start of the French and Indian War, when Washington, 23 years old, has been made an officer of the British Army, though only because he has taken a position that no one else wants: leading a militia of 150 volunteers into the Ohio Territory to wrest the land from the French, who’ve begun to put down stakes there. The first battle is a bloodbath, with the men picked off by musket fire almost at random. But not Washington. He’s so valiant he seems almost mystically protected.
The British, with their haughty dreams of empire, think they have the right to the land, and there are several two-ton ironies built into their attitude. The first is that George shares it — he wants nothing in the world so much as to join the British Empire (though he chafes, in his way, against the restrictions of their aristocratic system). But the real irony is that the British have teamed up with the Indigenous Seneca population, who loathe the French. Why do they prefer the English? “This land does not belong to you,” says Tanacharison, a Seneca leader played by Ryan Begay with a somber-voiced solemnity reminiscent of Graham Greene. “While you kill each other, we wait to reclaim it.” You want to tell him: Yeah, that’s not going to work out so well.
As Washington, William Franklyn-Miller is tall, lean and model-handsome in a way that feels out of period. He comes on like the next Jacob Elordi starring in a “Twilight” reboot. I realize the film is about young Washington, but given that it’s trying to tap into our feelings about this most mythic of American leaders, it never connects to our image of the later Washington. Yet Franklyn-Miller isn’t a bad actor; he gives George a quick lashing temper and a desire for fairness that’s instinctive in its smolder. There’s a flashback to Washington’s boyhood, just after his father has died, which means he can no longer attend school and is doomed to be the tenant farmer of Mount Vernon. His older and wealthier half-brother, Lawrence (John Foss), takes it upon himself to educate George, but still tells him: the chips are stacked against you. But he also teaches him a law that turns into the film’s ruling aphorism. It comes from chess: “Even a pawn can take the king.”
“Young Washington” is watchable in a stolid way, as if it were a “Masterpiece Theatre” movie made by the Ted Turner Pictures of 20 years ago. Washington has to talk his way into the military, and he’s constantly brushing up against the snobbery of scowling British officers, like the colonial administrator Robert Dinwiddie, played with haughty diffidence by Ben Kingsley. But he wins over the wealthy Lord Fairfax (Kelsey Grammer), who becomes his benefactor, and though Washington’s first military venture is an abject failure, that only heightens his resolve. He is made the aide-de-camp of Gen. Braddock (a blustery Andy Serkis), and this time, facing off against the French, he becomes the leader he was born to be. At one point he’s even an action hero, riding side-saddle, alternating between sword slashes and pumped bullets. By then Tanacharison is telling Washington that he is mystically protected, in the mode of certain Indigenous warriors who were placed on earth to be leaders.
The film shows us the ragtag beginnings of the rebel movement — the homegrown soldiers who prefer to wear blue uniforms (because they’re harder to see). That’s another metaphor: The British, in their highly visible redcoats, think they’re invincible. But they’re used to an older style of war, fought on open battlefields. (The Americans will be some of the first guerrillas.) “Young Washington” is just competent enough to create that crisp tug of schoolkid patriotism the books we read as children provided. Nothing wrong with that, as long as you’re not an adult confusing feel-good heroism with the lessons of history.
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