Young Washington introduces us to America’s founding father when he’s still a brash, ambitious youth. The movie serves as a great introduction to a period of history that few of us know very well. And while viewers will have to navigate battlefield violence, foul language and the specter of slavery, the PG-13 rating is relatively light.
It’s about 1753. France and Great Britain dominate the Western world. And they hateeach other.
No kidding. Since 1109, the two countries have gone to war with each other 17 separate times. And as each has gobbled up colonial holdings, their conflict has become global.
Now, both have their imperial eyes on North America’s fertile Ohio Country. (Never mind that the Native Americans living there are doing just fine without either of them, thank you very much.)
Enter the ambitious George Washington, a cultured young colonist who wants to break into Virginia’s societal upper crust. He’s fallen hard for young Sally Cary, one of the colony’s most beautiful and well-connected women. But in Virginia’s class-conscious world, George has little hope of marrying her.
Not unless he can make a name for himself, that is. So George sneaks into a party hosted by the incredibly wealthy and powerful Fairfax family, introduces himself to Lord Fairfax and somehow gets a job with the guy—surveying Fairfax’s sprawling lands in the largely unexplored Ohio Country.
During his work, George discovers that the French are apparently squatting on property that Fairfax and Britain would consider theirs. They’ve even built a fort.
Well, that’s not good, George thinks to himself. But George also knows an opportunity when he sees one. If George could somehow take the lead in kicking those pesky Frenchmen out of Ohio, he just might prove his worth to the Crown—and woo the fair Sally, too.
He just hopes that he doesn’t trigger, y’know, another war.
Most of us know of George Washington. You know, the first president of the United States, the guy on the dollar bill, etc. But a lot of us don’t know a ton about George Washington—especially who he was before the Revolutionary War.
In Young Washington, we meet a young man filled with intelligence and ambition, one who’s determined to conduct himself as a cultured, polite and unquestionably British gentleman. George works hard to shape his intellect and personality, and he treats almost everyone he comes across with respect and (if they’re his social “betters”) deference. But he clearly chafes at the uneven social board on which he plays, where Englishmen are considered inherently better than native-born colonists such as George. In this 1750s landscape, George aims to work within the system to change all that. (And that’s sorta nice—even though we viewers know that, in Washington’s near future, he’ll be a critical instrument in upending that system.)
But even as George is irked by the British’s supercilious sense of superiority, he’s plenty arrogant himself. Or he is until a devastating military reversal cuts the young Virginian down a notch or two. George suffers a humiliating defeat—but, for his career, at least, that proves not to be such a bad thing. He learns from his considerable mistakes. And Robert Dinwiddie, lieutenant governor of Virginia, remarks on George’s resilience: “For most, failure is the end. For you, failure seems only the beginning.”
George shows himself a courageous military leader, too, risking his own life to save a bevy of soldiers under his command.
The real, historical George Washington is sometimes described as a “Man of Providence,” and he believed firmly that God’s hand was at work in both his life and in the formation of the United States. In Young Washington, the U.S. is still a long way from being even a glimmer in George’s eye. But he comes to see the providence of God in his own life.
The concept of “providence” is drilled into George from his earliest days, thanks to his mother—though initially, the concept sounds to George like sadistic fate. George’s father dies when George is just 11 years old. Later, George’s mother, Mary, bemoans her husband’s passing. “I want a husband, back from his fever,” she says. “Providence denied me this.”
“Then providence is cruel!” George shouts.
“God raises what is well grounded,” Mary says. “You’ll not abandon what is ours. And nor will I.”
Later, new setbacks further shake George’s faith in a kind, loving God. Angry, he questions “providence” again. “Providence placed me here,” he tells his mother. “Why? For me to fail?”
“Perhaps,” Mary says. And then she serves up one of the movie’s best lines: “Failure is the tutor sent by God. If you don’t learn from it, you fail twice. If you do learn from it, you’ve earned wisdom.”
After George improbably survives a disastrous battle, a Native American chief—one who fought alongside the French—demands to meet George. His own warriors had George in their sights repeatedly. They “never miss,” he claims. And yet, somehow, George stands before him, uninjured. “The creator chose you,” the chief tells him. “You have been shielded by the spirit.”
Shortly thereafter, George shows up in Dinwiddie’s office with a bullet hole in his hat and a well-earned reputation for surviving impossible situations.
“How are you alive?” a dumbfounded Dinwiddie asks.
“A divine hand, perhaps,” George tells him.
George prays during a moment of crisis. “God, please help us,” he says. His mother talks about how she deals with the pressures of running the Washington holdings: “Keep a tally with one hand and a prayer from another.” She tells George that she was too hard on him when he was growing up: “That was my sin,” she says. We hear the occasional use of “God save the king.” A young George asks his half-brother, Lawrence, whether it’s true that Washington men are cursed to die young. Mary mentions that George will never become a British officer, “If God hears my prayers.”
As mentioned, George would love nothing better than to marry Sally Cary, a member of one of Virginia’s oldest and richest families. And while just about everyone who George talks with reminds him that Sally is “above his station,” that doesn’t stop George and Sally from having an 18th-century dalliance.
That “dalliance” consists of a romantic, tender kiss after an unchaperoned horse ride. The two also exchange pleasantries at a handful of parties, though those pleasantries are clearly meant to signal an underlying attraction. But alas, Sally later becomes betrothed to George William Fairfax, ending any romantic connection she and George Washington might’ve had. (In real life, George Washington and his wife, Martha, hosted George William and Sally Fairfax at Mount Vernon on many occasions, suggesting that there was no lingering animosity.)
George says that he was enticed to attend a party by “the promise of beautiful women.”
Young Washington dramatizes the events leading up to the French and Indian War, including the war’s initial bloody triggers. As such, we see plenty of fighting, shooting and chopping. And while none of it is particularly bloody or gory, it may come as a shock for those expecting a gentler “Christian” film from Angel Studios and Wonder Project.
A British commander gets shot and apparently mortally wounded. When George finds him, the commander is bleeding from the mouth and sports a bloody wound on his abdomen. He’s just one of hundreds of casualties during the battle. (George later notes that more than 400 of his compatriots died on the field.)
We see soldiers mowed down by musket fire and cannonballs (where soldiers are sometimes thrown into the air). They’re attacked by enemies bearing bayonets and tomahawks. (Those blades are violently wielded, though any blood-drawing blows are kept away from the camera lens.) George tells a nurse that she should only “attend to the ones that you can see breathing.”
It’s not the only battle or skirmish that moviegoers see. In another, an unintentional ambush sees many French soldiers fall to gunfire and axe blows. The French commander gets shot in the leg: He scrambles to get away, but a Native American chief known as the “Half King” catches him and kills him (off camera) with repeated blows of his hatchet—in spite of George’s pleas to stop. (The Half King, Tanacharison, despises the French, whom he says boiled and ate his father.) Later, George is forced to sign an admission that he was behind the “assassination” of the French leader—though because the document was in French and its interpretation botched, George insists he didn’t know what he was signing.
Another battle degenerates into an embarrassing, horrific route. Again, dozens of people are felled via musket fire, including one of George’s closest associates. People get pushed and squished into a muddy moat. Some get thwacked with gun butts, leading to bloody wounds. We see a surgeon use a bone saw. (We don’t see what he’s cutting, but we can assume.)
While surveying Lord Fairfax’s land, George and his guide, Christopher Gist, fall into an ice-cold river during the winter and nearly freeze to death. George, incredibly ill, falls off his horse and slips into unconsciousness. We see George’s half-brother (and father figure) Lawrence suffer mightily from consumption. (The handkerchief in which he coughs is covered in blood.)
Someone jams a knife into a table. British soldiers and Native Americans encounter one another in a tense showdown that includes a brandished hatchet.
We hear two uses of the word “b–tard” and three of the word “d–n.”
In order to hire Christopher Gist for his surveying mission, George dives into a raucous party-like atmosphere, where plenty of folk smoke and drink heavily. (A few revelers appear to be drunk, and smoke is thick in the air.)
Mary Washington is shown with a pipe in her hand. (Some stories allege that Washington’s mother was indeed a pipe smoker, though many historians doubt it.) Dinwiddie drinks wine, as do guests at a couple of Fairfax soirees.
George Washington is rightly lauded as one of the United States’ most preeminent heroes. But there’s no getting around the fact that he also owned slaves. Indeed, you look at a “Who’s Who” list of colonial Virginia, slave owners would dominate. To its credit, Young Washington does not attempt to sidestep that glaring issue, even as it seems to try to soften the blow.
When George laments to his mother that he has “nothing,” Mary reminds him of her own responsibilities—200 acres of land and “10 slaves in bondage to feed.” When George crashes a Fairfax party, he does so through the basement: It’s filled with African Americans working as the well-heeled whites upstairs eat and drink.
A member of the Fairfax family offers to send two of his best slaves on George’s first military mission. (George initially rejects the offer.) Later, soldiers look at slaves preparing for the upcoming battle. One asks a slave why they’re all there, and the slave answers that “we fight in [our owners’] stead.”
At another campsite, one soldier wonders why they don’t just arm the slaves in the fight against the French. “We need all the men we can get,” he says. But his fellow soldier says, “They might shoot us. Wouldn’t you?”
George’s interaction with people of color seems rather indifferent—though the film does portray him assisting some African American workers in clearing a road of a fallen tree (indicating, presumably, that he’s willing to work alongside people of color).
We’re also aware of tensions between the European colonial powers and the Native Americans who inhabit the land those powers are fighting over. The Half King, accompanied by some of his warriors, has a tense confrontation with George and Christopher Gist. Of the Ohio land, the Half King says, “You have no right.” George answers that he and Christopher are merely surveyors, which is true enough, but he knows full well that the Fairfaxes believe they have every right to the land he’s surveying. And a number of characters claim that the Ohio Country should be owned by whoever can tame it—or buy it.
British airs of superiority can be taxing here, and people are constantly telling George that the system is rigged against him. “Every triumph you have will be chalked up to luck, or native allies or the British themselves,” Lawrence warns him. “Never you.”
A number of characters lie and mislead. Even George himself—famous for allegedly never telling a lie—uses deception to sneak into a party.
Considering how important George Washington and his fellow founding fathers were to the establishment of the United States, it’s surprising how few movies feature them (Hamilton notwithstanding). Colonial and Revolutionary War America just don’t hold much appeal for Hollywood, apparently. And perhaps Washington—our rigid, pigtailed, never-smiling forefather—feels especially difficult to portray in film. When someone’s been so memorialized in marble, it can be hard to return him to a state of flesh and blood.
Luckily, Angel Studios and The Wonder Project are ready to play plucky rebels to Hollywood’s established aristocracy. Those studios, with director Jon Erwin, take Washington out of his Revolutionary role and whisk us into his life as a fiery youngster barely in his 20s—full of bravado, ambition and arrogance.
The studios behind Young Washington are, of course, faith-based institutions. But this does not feel like a Christian film—and I mean that as a compliment. Faith is, of course, an important part of the story because it was an important part of this period in history. But those spiritual elements are woven through the narrative with an organic ease. Instead of ignoring or downplaying Washington’s faith (as some secular Hollywood directors might) or fawning over it (as some Christian directors would like), Erwin gives Washington’s sense of providence its due without distracting us from the core historical narrative.
And that narrative is, mostly, both accurate and compelling. It gets the broadbrush basics of the lead-up to the French and Indian War (and Washington’s central role in that conflict) while fudging a bit on the details. It gives us a riveting war story without wallowing in blood and gore. It takes us into colonial British America and points to the seeds that eventually flowered into the American Revolution. And even as it presages the nation that Washington helped create—a nation founded on universal rights and liberty—it reminds us that those rights were not always so universal in practice. And that liberty itself was tragically conditional.
That’s not an easy balance to strike in the context of a two-hour movie meant to entertain as well as educate. But Young Washington does it well, thanks in part to a bevy of heavy hitters in supporting roles: Kelsey Grammar, Mary-Louise Parker, Andy Serkis and Oscar-winner Ben Kingsley come alongside newcomer William Franklyn-Miller.
Family audiences will have to navigate some battlefield violence and death. Characters drink, smoke and swear. And, of course, given the time period, viewers will witness slavery, too. But the PG-13 rating is a comparatively light one as the movie itself serves history and its audience well. And remember, we cannot tell a lie.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
