![]() (He is, by the way, duly named, for his journey is - metaphorically, of course - about turning in if only his countrymen might learn the lesson he does.) As Ada worries and longs for her man (with whom she barely exchanged 10 sentences prior to his departure), she writes letter after letter, which, in a lapse of empathy, she can’t imagine he doesn’t get, and while she hangs on for years in hope, she also believes he’s just not writing back. In the relationship between Ada and Inman, the film finds its most resonant nostalgia. Though she is largely confined to Black Cove farm, where she and her father, Reverend Monroe (Donald Sutherland), arrive before the War, Ada also endures calamitous change during the years leading to Inman’s return. Just as Inman’s passage is arduous, so too is Ada’s own coming to social consciousness and survivor’s steeliness. While the strategy allows for an array of “featured actors,” it also makes for a too calculated pace, as if the film is checking off scenes one by one, without clear thematic or even emotional links among them. The brevity of each of these incidents is a function of the film’s structure, but it also creates a sense of perpetual dislocation, which might coincide with the characters’, but also reflects basic problems inherent in adapting a lengthy novel. And so, he runs into the Reverend Veasey (Philip Seymour Hoffman), whom he stops from murdering the black woman pregnant with his child (she’s unconscious at the time) an opportunistic backwoodsman (Giovanni Ribisi) a miserable widow (Natalie Portman), whose baby he saves from brutal, desperate Union soldiers and the wise old goat-tender Maddy (Eileen Atkins), who bestows on him helpful principles. Adapted by Anthony Minghella from Charles Frazier’s 1997 novel, the movie takes up an episodic structure, such that Inman’s journey home - he deserts, following his own near fatal injury, a shot to the neck - leads him from one distressing encounter to another, Odyssey-style. If the movie makes one point clearly and repeatedly, it’s that war is a terrible unmaking - of men as much as boys, of community as much as nation.Īnd yet: following the model of Saving Private Ryan, in which an opening scene of utter mayhem is then recuperated by a lengthy romantic narrative, Cold Mountain proceeds to lay out bits of logic and moral order. Of course he’s not, but then, no one could be. As this moment evinces awareness of stakes for the nonwhite characters, it also dismisses them.Īnother image is more specific to the film’s concerns: Inman struggles mightily to save a pale slip of a Johnny Reb (Lucas Black) whom he recognizes from back home in Cold Mountain, North Carolina: “You’re Mo Oakley’s boy,” he calls out, just before the detonation literally rends the ground beneath them, then wonders aloud if he’s “old enough” to be here. ![]() That this is one of the film’s few references to the raced history and politics of the Civil War and its era (aside from Ada’s efforts to bring drinks on a tray to offscreen, unseen “Negroes”) is not a little troubling. One such concerns Inman’s comrade, a Native American, exchanging a look with a black man fighting for the North. The tumult of flying body parts, thickening smoke, and reddening mud offers few instances where viewers might feel anything but confusion. The film’s version of this crater-bound carnage is impressively alarming. “Like shooting fish in a barrel!” cries out one of Inman’s fellows, as they rush forward to kill as many opponents as possible in a frenzy of hand-to-hand combat. The result is pandemonium: the Yankees’ leadership is inept (drunk and slow to react), and the Southern soldiers find their enemies trapped in the gaping hole they have blown open. And then, “Burnside’s mine,” a 586-foot tunnel dug and rigged with explosives for weeks under the Southern camp, explodes. Neither the hunkered down Southern troops nor the advancing Northerners can anticipate the coming devastation (says one self-assured Southerner, “Them Yankee boys keep store hours”). It’s July 1864, and the Siege of Petersburg, Virginia is underway (it lasted from June 1864 to April 1865). As the camera reveals a company of filthy-faced, exhausted Confederate soldiers, Ada (Nicole Kidman) reads her letter to long-absent love Inman (Jude Law): “This awful war,” her voiceover lilts, imagining their eventual reunion, “will have changed us both beyond all reckoning.” The first scene in Cold Mountain is sensational and sickening, an apt introduction to a Civil War saga. ![]()
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