Cold Mountain: Movie Review

Cold Mountain tells the intertwining stories of a confederate deserter named Inman and the Southern belle Ada he left behind—Odysseus and Penelope in the Deep South. Unlike Homer’s Odyssey, it is pointlessly depressing, and concludes in a lackluster way that offers no explanation for the past two hours. If I hadn’t read the book, I’d be at a complete loss as to why anyone wanted to make this movie.

The novel won the National Book Award for author Charles Frazier, who, a Southerner himself, based the story on a family tale of an ancestor who got up from battle one day and decided to walk home.

The screenplay more or less follows the plot of the novel, but I must take issue with an early and defining choice made by writer-director Anthony Minghella (The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley). In the novel, Inman writes to Ada that he is a changed man, she may or may not still love him, but he’s coming home to see if she will have him. In the film, Ada writes to Inman and begs for his return. This mutation diminishes Ada’s inner journey, on which she discovers herself and her ability to provide for herself. Inman’s more literal outer journey shows his own need for exploration, as well as provides a contrast. Their separate stories also create a nice bit of symbolism regarding differences in the ways women and men think and learn. What makes their meeting stronger in the novel is that they have developed independently. One was not so much motivated to take the journey by the other. Each found the part within that led to a personal understanding that gives them the ability to join together. Shifting the basis for Inman’s journey also reduces the character to stark black and white. In the film version, Inman seems nothing more than the guy who is running home to rescue a woman who can’t take care of herself. A conventional take on the Southern belle, but one lacking in a more complex understanding of the character of a woman raised in this culture.

As I have learned from my own Southern heritage, the Southern belle may be trained to appear helpless, but she can be one of the shrewdest and strongest of women. She just likes to put people at ease. But for some reason this appreciation of refinement is viewed as weakness, which it is, and it isn’t (a nice bit of complexity for a character that Charles Frazier understood and uses in the novel). In the film, Ada is left with some simple gestures that capture none of this. A lover of music, she sells her piano for food.

Minghella’s characters are mostly one-dimensional. Ada, played by Nicole Kidman (Eyes Wide Shut, The Hours) is serious, very serious, and then depressed and serious. Jude Law (The Talented Mr. Ripley, Road to Perdition) as Inman isn’t much different. None of the actors get much more than one thing to do. And it is only the supporting cast that keeps this beast lumbering on. The film drags until Ruby, played by Renée Zellweger (Bridget Jones’s Diary, Chicago), walks on to provide her dimension: comic relief. Strangely, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s (Happiness, Punch-Drunk Love) supporting portrayal of the lecherous preacher Reverand Veasey is the only one who seems to capture any real complexity.

The film ultimately disappoints as the stories of Ada and Inman wind together, and the inevitable love scene unfolds in such an uncomfortable and forced manner that I found myself closing my eyes and hoping it would end. It seems no matter how alluring two people are, they can still look ridiculous together. And let’s just not talk about the dialogue before, during, and after the lovers meet, though Ed Wood would be proud.

The film is quite visually stunning but doesn’t quite capture the South, which isn’t much of a shock as it was filmed in Romania. The costuming is clever as Ada’s clothes appear first as elegant and continue to reappear in various states of disrepair as she learns to tend her farm. There’s also a great deal of disregard for the life of animals in the film, which mimics the lack of respect for human life at the time and in any war. It’s a shame, Cold Mountain has all the markings of a great film, and it just falls flat.