A review by Jeffrey Overstreet
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Director – Anthony Minghella
Written by Anthony Minghella, based on the novel by Charles Frazier
Director of photography – John Seale
Editor – Walter Murch
Music – Gabriel Yared
Production designer – Dante Ferretti
Producers – Sydney Pollack, William Horberg, Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa
Miramax Films. Running time: 155 minutes. Rated R.
STARRING: Jude Law (Inman), Nicole Kidman (Ada Monroe), Renée Zellweger (Ruby Thewes), Donald Sutherland (Reverend Monroe), Ray Winstone (Teague), Brendan Gleeson (Stobrod), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Veasey), Natalie Portman (Sara), Kathy Baker (Sally Swanger), James Gammon (Esco Swanger), Giovanni Ribisi (Junior), Eileen Atkins (Maddy), Charlie Hunnam (Bosie), Jena Malone (Ferry Girl), Ethan Suplee (Pangle), Jack White (Georgia), Lucas Black (Oakley), Jay Tavare (Swimmer) and Melora Walters (Lila).
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Filmmaker Anthony Minghella won Oscars several years ago for The English Patient, a story about a “hero” who betrayed his country and destroyed a marriage… all in the name of love.
Audiences cheered, but for what? The triumph of… lust? Self-indulgence? Self-absorption?
In his new film, Cold Mountain, the good director marries the technical proficiency and visual splendor of The English Patient with a much more meaningful epic narrative. Above all, this is a “Pilgrim’s Progress” that celebrates fidelity and true love.
This time, the hero is a simple and willful young man called Inman, played with passion and quiet angst by Jude Law. Inman is a young and handsome laborer who happens to fall in love just before the outbreak of the Civil War. He marches off to battle as if the conflict might be a brilliant alternative to carpentry. When he reaches Petersburg, the Battle of the Crater nearly destroys him. This galvanizing battle gives Minghella the subject of his career’s most virtuosic sequence. It’s the method of Saving Private Ryan applied to the Civil War, and it’s a nightmare.
Needless to say, our hero learns some hard lessons in the chaos and horror. He deserts the Southern forces and staggers homeward, injured and disillusioned. But he finds that it doesn’t matter if he leaves the war behind. Things grow darker the farther he travels. He encounters one horror after another – personal suffering, the spectacle of cruel men tormenting others, the hypocrisy and depravity possible in the name of religion – and he emerges with his ego abolished, knowing only one thing: He has tasted love, and he wants more of it.
Against the grand backdrop of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge mountains, a ravishing beauty named Ada (Nicole Kidman), who might have inspired a ballad called “Ada Straight and Tall,” waits for Inman to come home. Ada is the daughter of the gentle Reverend Monroe (Donald Sutherland), but in spite of her inherited faith, she remains a lonely spirit, stifled by the over-protective nature of a culture that keeps her packaged up in ribbons and bows. Her brief encounters with Inman sparked hope for intimacy and passion, something deeper than formality. When, like lovestruck Jacob, Inman clears a field for his piano-playing beauty, his love is proven true, even if it is a bit of the sparkly-Harlequin Romance variety. And then, war tears him away, and Ada is left with a fragile hope, sending letters off like bottled messages across a sea of uncertainty.
“If you are fighting, stop fighting,” Ada pleads in one of the few letters that reaches Inman successfully. “If you are marching, stop marching. Come back to me.” Inman must suspect that even if he does survive, he may never see Ada again. But love has awakened in him the same thing it has stirred in her – a resolute and irrational faith.
With the eyes of law and order focused on the battlefield, the homeland has become a battlefield of its own. Where the Hobbits of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings return to the Shire after their conflicts to find the homeland as happy and carefree as it was when they left it, Inman ventures home to a sadder, darker, truer reality. Evil meets him everywhere he turns – tyranny, brutality, rape, robbery, and torment.
Inman’s journey is as much a series of tests to his integrity as it is flight from predators. He collides with a sexually perverse Reverend Veasey (Philip Seymour Hoffman of Almost Famous), the antithesis of Ada’s father, who represents the sort of American who can use sacred language to mask sordid behavior. Another monster (Giovanni Ribisi of Heaven and TV’s Friends) baits Inman to a whorehouse and sets a deadly trap in motion. But Inman’s virtue meets both challenges. He is also lured by a temptress (Melora Walters of Magnolia) and offered cheap satisfaction by a business-minded ferry pilot (Donnie Darko’s Jena Malone, in a brief but astonishing appearance).
His most difficult challenge comes from a devastated widow (Natalie Portman of The Professional and, yes, Attack of the Clones) who appeals to his sense of charity. The scenes between Jude Law and Natalie Portman are the most intense and memorable in the film. Portman shows up in a small but riveting scene, in which she “grows up” as an actress, turning in a ferocious performance of fear, grief, sexual longing, and maternal rage.
Resilient through these challenges, Inman eventually risks his life to save his friends by confronting some of his own countrymen. He may not have come to a full realization of the evils of the Confederate states. But he is certainly on a path of selfless love, one that we might hope will lead him to a deeper understanding of why the Civil War became necessary in the first place.
Inman’s story is, however, only half of the story. Ada is living out a nightmare of her own.
Back on the ranch, a tyrannical and malevolent brute named Teague (Ray Winstone of Sexy Beast) and his cronies (including an unsettling albino, Bosie, played by Nicholas Nickleby’s Charlie Hunnam) tramp across the countryside, punishing anybody who smells like they might sympathize with deserters. They don’t seem as interested in the issue of desertion as they are in the possibility of having someone to flog and torture.
Holding down her father’s fort, Ada can smell their predatory intent. She watches Teague circle the property, a lustful devil who covets both the 300-acre farm and the golden-haired beauty tending it. As she resists his less-than-amorous overtures, she sinks slowly into despair. For a while, it seems likely she’ll become the local psychopath driven mad by love, along the lines of the mad woman in the attic of Wide Sargasso Sea.
Just in time, unlikely help arrives. Ruby (Renee Zellweger) is a feisty tornado of a character, a woman of the backwoods who knows how to build what is necessary and plant was is essential to stay alive. She appoints herself servant and caretaker to Ada in order to help her get through the hard times, demanding only that she share in the profits. In a sense, the two come to show what a healthy slave/master relationship could be, ideally-in other words, a decent employer and a decent employee. Ruby knows about being alone and surviving without men. Her own father Stobrod (Brendan Gleeson) abandoned her years ago to fend for herself. His crime lit a fuse in her that hisses and spits, threatening to explode if he ever surfaces.
Of course, he does surface. Thus, we’re given an example of a personal division, marred by error and sin, in which there might eventually be a violent resolution or the possibility of reconciliation. This humorous subplot serves the story well, giving us an apt metaphor for civil war. These divided souls just might be able to resolve their differences through a change of heart, longsuffering, compassion, and forgiveness.
Zellweger’s performance seems a bit over-the-top at first, but eventually her spirit keeps the film from collapsing under the weight of its own melodrama. We should hope nobody ever squelches her unique spark.
Kidman, on the other hand, is not so successful. Her intense devotion to creating a convincing Southern beauty gives us too much manner, not enough personality. Where she found spunk and character beneath the surface of her characters in Moulin Rouge! and The Hours, she’s not much more than an archetype here. But it’s a compelling character all the same. We can see how she needs to grow in order to survive in this world, and at the end of the film it’s a very different Ada that confronts us, standing with a loaded rifle, ready to shoot even before she can see who it is that comes to call.
Thus, Cold Mountain becomes a story of faith-filled hearts, of heroes bending under the pressure of evil, but refusing to break. They hold on in hope of attaining sacred love.
It is just the kind of faith that allows for the possibility of miracles. And while it would be easy to interpret the visions that Ada sees in a spooky well and the prophecy of a blind man as flimsy paranormal devices included to add mystery and magic to melodrama, these things could also be seen as metaphors for the ways in which we seek evidence of God’s work in the world. We pray, we seek, we take comfort in irrational signs. And sometimes, that faith is rewarded with satisfaction. Even when it is not, it brings out the better parts of our nature and gives the Almighty room to communicate things we need to hear.
The story brings us to an appreciation for the rituals and sacraments that we often take for granted. For some, the luxury of freedom has turned sacred love into a laughable notion. These characters know better. The evils around them have shown them how rare and precious their devotion is.
Some of my fellow religious press critics are loudly objecting to the union of two characters who cannot seem to wait for a church wedding. These critics seem to forget that, in this place and time, the land was in chaos. There was no local church, no department store where the engaged could register for gifts, no way to send out invitations. There was not necessarily a minister available to perform the ritual. In this circumstance, there were only two souls desiring to dedicate themselves to each other before God completely, devotedly, before the wolves around them close in.
In Charles Frazier’s vision of the south, characters long for but cannot find that lost Eden of ritual, safety, and sacrament. In their battlescarred world, they must grasp what pieces of Eden’s wreckage they can.
Frazier has penned a memorable epic. Minghella casts it in gorgeous lighting and cinematography, unforgettable and poetic imagery, and some powerfully memorable performances that keep the film unpredictably wavering between melodrama and comedy, scenes of paralyzing violence, pastoral beauty, and surrealistic backwoods depravity. He resists the temptation to revel in his own mastery of period detail, and grounds us in the day-to-day struggles and emotions of characters created by novelist Charles Frazier. He makes the story’s central themes resonate like the strains of T-Bone Burnett’s history-soaked (hickory smoked?) soundtrack.
One of the film’s two unfortunate flaws is the fact that it fails to inspire us with the romance of its heroes in the crucial opening scenes. Inman and Ada encounter each other in a soup of Harlequin romance clichés. He’s the carpenter whose throat is so full of sawdust he hardly speaks a word. She’s the tradition-bound trophy who just wants to let down her hair, but her hands are busy holding trays of apple cider. In one scene, Frazier brings up Wuthering Heights, as if worried his story doesn’t have enough romantic pathos of its own.
The other problem is the film’s duration – it’s long, but not nearly long enough.
With another hour, Cold Mountain might have gone from good to great. It feels like the final cut was ripped from Minghella’s grasp by a Miramax executive and tossed into a blender. It feels like watching “Highlights from Cold Mountain.” In some scenes, the narration for the next scene has begun before we have had a chance to absorb the gravity of what is currently occurring. The scenes feel like dominoes – they once stood in a progression with room to breathe between them, but now they’ve been knocked down. They lay half-covering each other, with their potential energy robbed.
Too bad. Cold Mountain joins Billy Bob Thornton’s All the Pretty Horses as a severely over-edited addition to the list of Almost-Great Feature Films. Watching it is an excruciating experience-like reading the Cliff’s Notes version of The Odyssey and imagining how compelling it must be to experience the full adventure.
