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Oh,
Carolina! : Cold Mountain
Though a flawed
film in many respects, Cold Mountain succeeds in its main intention:
it convinces us that war – in this case, the US Civil War – is hell, on
the battleground and, more importantly, off. The only real frontline skirmish
we see takes place, spectacularly, in the first fifteen minutes.Afterwards,
the scope – while remaining ‘epic’ in terms of emotion - becomes much
more concentrated on the plight of specific individuals caught up in the
sweep of history.
Injured confederate
soldier Inman (Jude Law), sickened by the blood-and-gore senselessness
of what he’s seen, escapes from military hospital and starts the journey
back home to Cold Mountain, North Carolina, where for months and years
his sweetheart Ada (Nicole Kidman) has been stoically waiting. The film
unfolds in two parallel strands, following on the one hand Inman’s hazardous
progress through beautiful but largely hostile terrain, and on the other
Ada’s life on her farm. An educated Southern belle from Charleston, she
proves ill-equipped to survive the tough Carolina semi-wilderness after
the death of her father, Reverend Monroe (Donald Sutherland).
A concerned
neighbour organises help, however, in the form of no-nonsense, resiliently
pragmatic Ruby (Renee Zellweger), who starts putting the farm in order.
But Ada and Ruby face dangers of their own: the brutal Teague (Ray Winstone),
who abuses his position as head of the local Home Guard - reponsible for
capturing deserters and punishing those who aid them. Teague, whose family
formerly owned much of Cold Mountain, has designs on the farm and perhaps
even on Ada herself…
This is a big,
expensive, prestige production from Miramax, a studio which ever year
comes up with at least one such wannabe-epic designed expressly for the
purpose of winning Oscar nominations and awards – Minghella’s English
Patient was a prime example of mission accomplished, but his Talented
Mr Ripley didn’t prove so suited to Academy tastes. Cold Mountain,
in theory, has it all: adapted from a well-received, best-selling, doorstop
novel (by Charles Frazier) which itself quietly harks back to classical
sources (the Odyssey), it boasts top-drawer personnel on
both sides of the camera. Oscar-winners involved include legendary editor
Walter Murch, cinematographer John Seale, costume-designer Ann Roth (working
here with Carlo Poggioli) and score-writer Gabriel Yared.
Among the more
visible talent, the stellar central couple of Law and Kidman are backed
up by a shamelessly energetic Zellweger, plus predictably vivid character
turns from Winstone, Sutherland, Brendan Gleeson (Zellweger’s long-lost
dad), Eileen Atkins (a hermit-woman who tends the injured Inman), Ripley’s
Philip Seymour Hoffman (top value* and looking like Harry Knowles as a
randy vicar), Natalie Portman, Giovanni Ribisi and so on. It isn’t unusual
for such a major Hollywood production to have such a starry cast, of course,
but the viewer doesn’t usually notice – it’s a sign that something
isn’t quite right about Cold Mountain that you’re constantly distracted
by, say, the presence of the White Stripes’ Jack White as a travelling
minstrel, or the terrific James Rebhorn flitting through as a Doctor.
It’s an ensemble of sorts, but a decidedly atomised ensemble, one
which never meshes together into a convincing portrait of a society in
crisis.
Perhaps it’s
something to do with the accents: the cast is full of non-Americans putting
on various forms of southern twang/drawl (not since Black
Hawk Down have so many ‘foreigners’ appeared in such an American
tale), and even Zellweger – who actually is from Down South – lays
it on so thick she’s occasionally incomprehensible. Or perhaps it’s the
fact that Cold Mountain was almost entirely filmed in beautiful,
rural Romania (a fact should be exploited by the local tourist authorities,
a la Lord of the Rings)
– though this is, visually, an entirely convincing double for the American
south of 1864. Or perhaps it’s the constant alternation between the Inman
and Ada plots, which isn’t helped by the necessarily episodic and picaresque
nature of Inman’s progress.
 It
doesn’t help, of course, that in a film which is supposed to be simultaneously
a war movie and a great romance, there’s very little ‘war action’ and
the romantic couple – as they themselves acknowledge – have only just
met before he vanishes off for years on end. This aspect would probably
not be a major problem in Frazier’s book, where the individual characters
of Ada and Inman could be explore in much greater depth and detail. Minghella,
who wrote the screenplay himself, inevitably must summarise and condense,
relying heavily on voice-over narration as the lovers read out letters
they send to each other, very few of which ever arrive.
All this voice-over
does make Cold Mountain something of an old-fashioned film, however
– as does Minghella’s use of on-screen titles to impart crucial information
of geography and chronology. He isn’t shy of augmenting the striking visuals
with slightly clumsy filters on occasion, making the top half of the image
slightly but noticeably dark for deliberate effect. And while he can’t
for once inflict his love of jazz on the audience (an unfortunate tendency
he shares with Mike Figgis), he instead lathers the soundtrack with wall-to-wall
bluegrass, all twingly-twangly geetars, banjos and violins. Minghella
has never been one of those directors we look to for groundbreaking originality,
of course, and true to form he often resorts to cinematic cliché: even
the very last shot is that craning-back-and-up-from-outside-dining-table
we’ve seen a hundred times before.
The story itself
also conforms to familiar expectations, and seldom strays far from corn
– very early on, a gallant young soldier (an unrecognisable Lucas Black)
takes a bayonet to the chest, expiring in traditional style on a hospital
stretcher. At a pivotal moment, Ada peers into a well and sees a ‘vision’
concerning Inman which is, of course, fulfilled in the final reel - but
she isn’t the only one able to glimpse what’s around the corner. The film
traces a well-worn tragic-romantic arc, and the predictable nature of
events is heightened by the stark black-and-white polarity between ‘goodies’
and ‘baddies’: Inman is pretty much a saint, whereas Teague is simply
evil and cruel. And his main henchman is a character who unfortunately
revives that thankfully long-dormant cinematic bogeyman, the ‘evil albino’
– Charlie Hunnam in a role that strongly recalls Jonathan Rhys-Myers’
sadistic young fop from Ang Lee’s commercial misfire Ride With the
Devil.
While Cold
Mountain resembles Ride With the Devil in many respects, Lee
and his co-scriptwriter James Schamus did manage to tackle the issue of
race head-on: Cold Mountain isn’t concerned with political issues.
Except that, by tearing itself apart in Civil War, America has effectively
gone back to the harsh, frontier state endured by the Pilgrim Fathers
and their immediate successors. Minghella is strong at showing how the
fabric of a civilised society can quickly be ripped apart, and how the
ensuing nightmare can be drastically worsened by vicious opportunists
like Teague – at such moments, he approaches the kind of world-gone-to-hell
ambience of Cormac McCarthy’s novels like Outer Dark.
On this level,
Cold Mountain is effective, but it never quite manages to sweep
the viewer along in the way that such a long, sumptuous production really
should. It’s tempting to imagine a real-life Ruby watching Minghella at
work, and impatiently telling him off for his cliches, his time-taking
and his simple carelessness: how does Inman escape from the military hospital
in the first place? When, at the climax, a major character is shot, why
don’t we find out the extent of their injuries? That angelic child we
see in the coda, is she Ada’s or Ruby’s? And after enduring their various
depradations and hardships, is it really good enough to have Ada and Inman
just stumble across each other by accident one frosty morning? Cold
Mountain as a title ends up fitting all too well: big, beautiful,
often impressive. But it might easily leaving you feeling a little, er,
chilly.
23rd
December, 2003
* Hoffman’s
delivery of certain (innocuous-looking) lines justifies the admission-price
on their own: “I was vain about my hair” … “That’s a rank odor from that
animal.” Hold your breath for his Capote.
click
here for Neil’s short review of Cold Mountain
by Neil
Young
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