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COLD
MOUNTAIN SUBTLY EXPOSES THE INSANITY OF VIOLENCE
 At
the center of Cold Mountain, directed
by Anthony Minghella, is a love story that spans the years
from 1861 to 1864, largely taking place in Cold Mountain, North
Carolina, a community in the Appalachians (though none of the
filming is actually in that state). The film has several flashbacks
and flashforwards to lay the premise for a romance which, due
to the Civil War, is never quite consummated. Chronologically,
the story begins when Ada Monroe (played by Nicole Kidman)
rides into the community with her father, the Reverend Monroe
(played by Donald Sutherland), who has left Charleston for
the fresher air of the mountains. His church is being constructed
when they arrive. Inman (played by Jude Law), one of the construction
workers, is immediately attracted to the glamorously dressed
Ada, who returns the compliment by offering him a glass of
cider. An improbable love affair then blooms. However, one
Sunday word reaches the community that North Carolina has seceded,
and the Civil War has begun. Inman goes off to war after a
single passionate kiss with Ada, while she remains with her
father. Reverend Monroe, however, dies soon thereafter, leaving
her alone until Ruby (played by Renee Zellweger) comes along,
having run out on her abusive husband, to help out with the
livestock and vegetables while Ada awaits Inman's return from
the war. Several anti-war themes pervade Cold Mountain,
albeit very subtly, and the film glosses over the racism that
the South was so impetuously trying to defend. The first exposé comes
early, during the 1864 siege of Petersburg, when many soldiers
on both sides perish in an ill-planned assault on a trench
built by the Southern army. In a subsequent battle, Inman is
wounded, again underscoring the brutality of war. Sentimentally,
Inman holds dear a book that was Ada's going-away present into
which he presses her photograph and three letters that she
sent, promising to await his return. Ada, in turn, treasures
a photo of Inman as well as a few letters, which ominously
stop coming after autumn 1863. While wounded, a hospital volunteer
reads her latest letter to him one day, and he soon decides
to join the ranks of the deserters. Much of the remaining story
is about his Homeric trek from the battlefield through the
Blue Ridge Mountains to Cold Mountain, where conditions become
nasty while he is on his way.
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A
renegade band of Southerners hunts deserters, enjoying
the opportunity to shoot them in
cold blood as well as those who harbor them. A
detachment of Northerners is out to seize livestock and,
if possible, the
opportunity to rape a Southern woman. While men die in combat,
women suffer at home. After the war, according to Ada's voiceover,
all seek to return to normalcy. However, normal times do not
come back to the South after the Civil War, a story told eloquently
in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes (1941).
Based on the novel by Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain may not
measure up to the drama of Gone with the Wind (1939),
which recounts a somewhat similar tragedy in a different part
of the South, but the composed focus on the indignity of war
places Cold Mountain on a higher
plane. Accordingly, the Political Film Society has nominated Cold
Mountain as best film of 2003 in raising consciousness
about the foolishness of violent methods and superiority of
peaceful methods for resolving conflicts. MH
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Cold
Mountain
by Charles Frazier
Cold
Mountain is an extraordinary novel about a soldier's
perilous journey back to his beloved at the end
of the Civil War.
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OTHER
FILMS TO WATCH
The House of Sand and
Fog, directed by Vadim Perelman, is the
story of someone who buys a foreclosed house to turn a profit
but unexpectedly meets the former owner, whose house was
wrongly taken away from her; the clash between the cultures
of the former owner and new owner leads to tragedy. The
Last Samurai, directed by Edward Zwick,
is yet another film promoting cultural awareness; set in
Japan during 1866-1867, the Caucasian hero finds the bushido
code worth defending, though he was hired to train the new
Japanese imperial army to defeat the samurai defending the
last feudal clan. Mona
Lisa Smile, directed by Mike Newell, is
a film that portrays the arrival of nascent women's liberation
concepts at conservative Wellesley College in 1953; the film
was inspired by the fact that both Hillary Clinton and Monica
Lewinsky were Wellesley graduates, albeit more than fifteen
years later.
POLLS
CLOSE ON NOMINATIONS FOR BEST POLITICAL FILMS OF 2003
December 31 is the last day to nominate films
for Political Film Society awards for 2003.
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