“Cold Mountain” is a splendid production, filmed partially in the American South, but mostly with Romania used as a stand-in. Cinematographer John Seale captures both the grime and the splendor of wilderness, and Jude Law is perhaps even more dirty, sweaty, and bloody than in “Enemy at the Gates.” All the period details, including weaponry, costumes, trenches, fences, and log cabins, have been carefully and convincingly crafted. The cast is solid and reliable, and all the Brits, Aussies, and Irishmen do fine with Southern accents. The movie is mostly held together by Jude Law, who plays Inman as both resolved and resigned. But there’s something a little awkward or uncertain about director-screenwriter Anthony Minghella’s film. When I first heard that Frazier’s novel was going to be adapted into a film, Minghella did not jump instantly to mind as the man who should steer it. A slow-paced, lightly-plotted tale of the South during war time, featuring matter-of-fact characters who don’t talk much, screams out for Terence Malick (“The Thin Red Line”) to contrast the futility of human squabbles with the placid indifference of the countryside.
Minghella’s film, while a good one, seems comprised of pieces that don’t quite always fit. He has employed grandiloquent, perhaps even pompous letters sent between Ada and Inman as a kind of narrative Scotch tape, joining scenes that might otherwise not quite fit together. This air of uncertainty permeates the film in other places. Cuts and camera angles are employed, not carelessly, but certainly without the confidence and precision which made Minghella’s “Talented Mr. Ripley” and “The English Patient” so absorbing. Characters die when they seem to have run out of things to do. Ada and Inman’s romance is understandable, on the level of a spontaneous attraction combined with longing while the other is far away, but not enormously compelling. I was moved by how Inman, as he explains early in the film, is willing to trade his life to make a real connection with Ada instead of the imaginary, impossible one they have shared thus far. But maybe Minghella’s goal is not to make a smooth picture, but to make a jarring one, in which widows go for rifles without having to think too much, in which the stupidity of war strikes people down right in the middle of something, in which the normal laws of cause-and-effect have given way to the barbarism of an invaded land.
Still, “Cold Mountain” is a powerful film, not so much a message movie as a tough slice of life out of an important chapter of American history. Especially moving interludes include the last moments of a friendship between Ruby’s father with a simpleton banjo player; the lot of a young widow (Natalie Portman) who wants Inman not for sex but just to remember what it was like to have a second, larger person in the bed with her; and the older couple harboring their deserter children. In addition to the ghastly opening battle, Minghella shoots his brief spurts of violence with an intensity that outshines many action directors. And when Inman and Ada finally do see each face-to-face, there is a tenderness to how they fear each might not love the inhuman thing war has made out of the other, and there’s a sweetness to how they describe their pre-war shyness and concerns of propriety as “pointless.” Like I wrote in my review of “My Name is Ivan,” sometimes all a war movie has to say is “this is war, and it sucks.”
Finished December 28th, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night
WOULD I RECOMMEND THIS MOVIE TO…
Small children: No
Parents-in-law: Yes.
Mom: Probably, but it might be a little long.
Dad: Yup.
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