Boy George

A smaller country, it is implied—geographically smaller, and smaller in soul—simply could not have handled the monster-truck greatness of this man. It would have ruptured or burst. For greatness like this, only America would have been big enough.Weems’s Washington is famously great all the way through, great from the get-go: an angelic child, fanned by the warm wings of “ministering spirits,” who matures irreversibly into a mighty warrior and then a world-shaking leader. But what if greatness is something you grow into, patchily and vexedly, under pressure? Young Washington, a new biopic, gives us pre-Revolutionary George, early-20s George, pale, petulant, virginal, ramrod-straight, and bristling with awkwardness and ambition. He is callow, unformed. Imperfect, in a word. And when he starts soldiering, he makes some rather large mistakes.[Read: George Washington, man of mystery]As played by the very beautiful (and curiously English) William Franklyn-Miller, this Washington is an underdog. He’s an interloper, an uppity tenant farmer seeking to make a name for himself in service of the Crown. He goes on surveying missions and nearly freezes to death. Unembraced by Virginian high society, he crashes a party at the mansion of Lord Fairfax, entering via the basement. (It’s here that he meets Sally Cary, soon to marry into the Fairfax family, and begins a stilted flirtation with her.) Across the Appalachians, in the murk of the Ohio wilderness, is the developing fault line between two contending empires: the British and the French. Who will claim this endless, uncertain landscape? Having trekked the territory