Lost in Adaptation

"The slaves left." In three words, Sofia Coppola's new film The Beguiled casually dispenses with one of the great shames of the American republic. Coppola's film is an elegant Southern Gothic tale of masculine charms and feminine vengeance, completely stripped of its historical and racial context. While not every period genre picture need grapple with the "peculiar institution," this is a film set during the Civil War, unfolding between Southern women and a Northern soldier, and it goes so far a...