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Movie Reviews
| Cold Mountain. Dir. by Anthony Minghella. Miramax Films, 2003. 152 mins.
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Cold Mountain is part of a film genre of intimate historical
epics—Dr. Zhivago (1965), Reds (1981), The
English Patient (1996), Pearl Harbor (2001)—in which
war serves as the catalyst for doomed romance. It is often war that
brings lovers together and then pulls them apart—sometimes
temporarily, sometimes for good. As Humphrey Bogart's Rick Blaine
states in Casablanca (1942), a somewhat-less-than-epic variation
of this Hollywood type, "the problems of three little people don't
amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." But of course, it
is just that—the problems of these "little people"—that
draw us in as viewers and allow us to relate to a particular "crazy
world," the chaos and trauma of war, on such a personal and tangible
level.
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Curiously, the Civil War has only rarely provided the setting for such film spectacles, although Gone with the Wind (1939) is, of course, the granddaddy of them all. But other than that and Shenandoah, a 1965 drama starring Jimmy Stewart as a Virginia farmer determined to keep his family out of the conflict, no major Hollywood film has dealt as fully with Southerners and their home front plight as does Cold Mountain. Anthony Minghella's elaborate production does so through its dramatization of lovers' separation and their desperation to reunite in a narrative so emotionally compelling as to assure its success both in the late 1990s on best-seller lists and earlier this year at the box office. |
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Charles Frazier based his 1997 novel on the experience of his own great-great-uncle, the Confederate enlistee W. P. Inman, who in late 1864 escaped from an Illinois prison camp and made the trek home—on foot!—to his North Carolina home near Cold Mountain, a high but fairly nondescript peak some twenty miles southwest of Asheville, where the Blue Ridge Mountains merge with the Great Smokies. He was within three miles of home when he met his death in a skirmish at the hands of a particularly notorious home guard unit that had plagued local residents for much of the war. |
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From those bare facts, Frazier set his fictional Inman on a harrowing odyssey across North Carolina, heading home from a hospital in Raleigh where he was recovering from wounds suffered at Petersburg, Virginia. During his trek in the fall of 1864, he encounters beleaguered widows, bushwhackers, Union renegades, fellow deserters, and the seemingly omnipresent home guardsmen, who collectively suggest the disorder, desperation, and corruption that characterized Southerners' struggle to survive in the ever more lawless and dysfunctional society that had developed in nearly four years of war. Minghella's film is unusually faithful to the book in re-creating these encounters, and one of its great strengths is that they are presented in such graphic, unflinching form, more often than not with violent resolutions that genuinely shock. Rarely has the collective plight of a people at war been conveyed to movie audiences as effectively as it is in this series of disturbing and emotionally charged episodes. |
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