“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.
