The Civil War epic drama "Cold Mountain" left an indelible mark on my psyche with its heartbreaking beauty and scope.
Director Anthony Minghella created an American masterpiece with this adaptation of Charles Frazier's novel. Everything, from the cinematography to the soundtrack, is enamouring.
Nicole Kidman breathes a tender vulnerability in her role as the sole caretaker of a farm. Her magnetic longing for Jude Law's exhausted soldier is as intimate as it is folksy.
Law himself disappears into a role that demands grit, humour and humanity in a grim scene of bloodshed. Renée Zellweger also shines in a decisive supporting role.
Visually transportive and richly woven with period detail, Cold Mountain captures the tragedy and perseverance of a nation in its darkest hour, but one that still finds hope.
Minghella succeeds in making every frame powerfully moving. An epic for the ages that will become more resonant with the passage of time.
Wars can create as much misery, and sometimes even more, for civilians far from battlefields than for soldiers who actually fight. The US Civil War, the bloodiest, most destructive, and most traumatic of all armed conflicts in American history, wasn’t an exception. This aspect of the war, especially when it played out in more remote and less strategically important areas of the divided country, wasn’t particularly popular among authors of fiction or cinema. One of the more notable exceptions in recent decades was Cold Mountain, a 2003 epic period drama written and directed by Anthony Minghella.
The film is based on the eponymous 1997 novel by Charles Frazier. It begins in summer 1864 during the Siege of Petersburg when Confederate fortified lines are blown up by a mine set by Union underground sappers, after which Union forces rush through the newly created gap only to be counterattacked by Confederates and suffer a significant defeat in what would later be known as the Battle of the Crater. The protagonist, played by Jude Law, is William “W.P.” Inman, a young soldier of the Confederate States Army. Although his side has won the battle, Inman has seen too much carnage and too many of his friends die in the past three years. He decides to desert and return to Cold Mountain, his native region of North Carolina. One of the reasons for this is letters from Ada Monroe (played by Nicole Kidman), the beautiful daughter of the Reverend Monroe (played by Donald Sutherland), who had arrived in the area from Charleston before the war. As Inman travels back home, experiencing all kinds of hardships, dangers, and encounters with colourful characters, Ada suffers many deprivations caused by war and poverty. Her father has died, the war has impoverished her, and, being a delicate city-dwelling woman, she lacks basic skills to run a farm. She almost starves to death before kind-hearted neighbour Sally Swanger (played by Kathy Baker) finds her help in the form of uneducated but farm-experienced Ruby Thewes (played by Renée Zellweger). In the meantime, Ada becomes the object of interest for Teague (played by Ray Winstone), leader of the local Confederate Home Guard, a paramilitary force that hunts down and murders real or suspected deserters.
Produced by Miramax, Cold Mountain was clearly intended to grab Oscars, thus repeating the success of The English Patient, another prestigious adaptation of a war-themed novel made by the same studio and director seven years earlier. As such, it was quite an ambitious project, with almost $80 million budget, of which relatively little is seen on screen. The most spectacular battle scene happens at the very beginning, and what follows looks much more down-to-earth. This is, in many ways, the film’s advantage. Cold Mountain doesn’t burden audiences with noble causes, debates about slavery or states’ rights, or military and political issues. What Minghella’s script shows is simple and more understandable drama, with characters being ordinary people dealing with simple but harrowing life-and-death issues that war can bring even to places that aren’t directly affected by fighting. Minghella directs the film very well, maintaining a good tempo, and Cold Mountain doesn’t feel overlong despite its running time of over two and a half hours. He had a very good editor in experienced Walter Murch, as well as cinematographer John Seale, who skilfully plays with colour and different styles to create various moods, aided by Romanian locations that convincingly stand in for the mountains of North Carolina. Cold Mountain also features good music that combines a conventional soundtrack by French composer Gabriel Yared and traditional folk songs, some of which are performed by Jack White, musician of White Stripes fame, who appears in the film in a small role as a musician named Georgia.
Cold Mountain also boasts a rather impressive cast, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage. A relatively large number of small roles are played by notable actors, some of whom are stars in their own right, like Philip Seymour Hoffman, Giovanni Ribisi, Charlie Hunnam, or Natalie Portman, and that, to a degree, makes this otherwise realistic period drama resemble a Hollywood extravaganza. While Jude Law looks relatively convincing in his role, this isn’t the case with Nicole Kidman, who is both too old and too glamorous for the part of an ordinary woman. She is easily upstaged by Renée Zellweger, who is much more convincing as an unrefined country woman with common sense. Zellweger made a very good impression and won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Although it didn’t have as much impact with critics and award shows as Miramax had hoped, Cold Mountain represents one of the finer 21st-century Hollywood films dedicated to the US Civil War.
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