Civil War historian Gary Gallagher has noted the stark difference in fictional portrayals of the Northern and Southern home fronts. Stories set in the North like the Gary Cooper film Friendly Persuasion and Louisa May Alcott’s famous novel (with its own numerous cinematic adaptations) Little Women are more slice-of-life affairs with occasional wartime disturbances. By contrast, stories set beyond the battle lines in the South are deeply melodramatic affairs involving great matters of life and death, often with deeply tragic results. This makes sense, as most of the war was fought in the South. Everybody is familiar with the upper-class dramas, such as Gone with the Wind (which almost made my list, but was not included because I already had so many long movies from this era). Cold Mountain, however, takes a look at the lower classes, with almost no plantations in sight.
Cold
Mountain
was a huge labor of love for director Anthony Minghella. He was quite taken
with the themes and prose of Charles Frazier’s source novel of the same name.
Frazier grew up in western North Carolina and became interested in the history
of the region, particularly the Blue Mountains. Using his research, he wrote
the tale of William Inman, a Confederate soldier who deserts after receiving a
wound, and his attempt to return to his love, Ada Monroe, at Cold Mountain. In
the movie this pair of main protagonists is played by Jude Law and Nicole
Kidman. Determined to get the scenery right, Minghella actually filmed most of the movie in mountainous parts of Romania (including Transylvania!) to avoid the hassle of modern additions to the American South.
The setting of western North Carolina is key to the story. Mountainous regions of the South were not conducive to the labor-intensive plantations, where dozens to hundreds of black slaves worked. Since they had not built such a critical reliance on this system of forced labor, areas such as Northwest Arkansas, East Tennessee, and most famously West Virginia were thus more Unionist, seeing the Confederacy as an invention of the larger slaveholders. North Carolina had its fair share of Unionists in the west, though they don’t appear in lieu of disaffected Confederates and pacifists. The slavery issue is actually not all that present. There’s one scene where Inman comes across a crowd of fugitive slaves, and Ada Monroe and her preacher father (Donald Sutherland) own a few who are barely seen and run away offscreen. Otherwise slavery is mostly mentioned as the cause of the elites who make the lower-class whites go off to war in their stead.
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| Ada Monroe (Nicole Kidman) offers lemonade to William Inman (Jude Law) |
As previously mentioned, there are two main characters whose plot threads run towards each other. Ada Monroe represents the struggle of Southern women who were left to fend for themselves while the men went off to war. After her father dies, she fails miserably at running her farm. Fortunately the tough-as-nails country girl Ruby Thewes (Renee Zellweger in an Oscar-winning performance) is sent over to straighten things out. Ada herself is an okay character, but Ruby, with her over-the-top country girl accent and hard attitude, steals the show. She’s one of my two favorite characters, the other being her father Stobrod (Brendan Gleeson). Like Inman, he deserts and undergoes his own journey, turning from a bad father into a master fiddler with the magical ability to touch almost any soul with his music. Gleeson could actually play the fiddle himself and does so for real here. This is a good time to mention the soundtrack. Most of it is a collection of traditional bluegrass and folk songs. (if you've already seen the move or don't care about spoilers, this is my favorite scene)
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| A disgraced Reverend Veasey (Philip Seymour Hoffman) gets quite interested in a saw. |
Inman’s story sees him travel through the disintegrating social order of the South, where women are left defenseless, crime runs rampant, and both Confederate Home Guards and Union cavalry patrols take the opportunity to indulge their violent desires. This movie has quite the cast and much of it is put into the collection of characters Inman bumps into. These include the not-so-righteous Reverend Solomon Veasey (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a business-savvy ferry girl (Jena Malone), a creepy woodsman with a seemingly polyandrous and incestuous family setup, a depressed widow (Natalie Portman), and an herbalist lady with a pet goat.
One threat that both characters face is
the Confederate Home Guard, with those back near Cold Mountain led by Teague
(Ray Winstone). While Teague is in the book, Minghella gives him an additional motive of seizing Ada and her property for himself. The portrayal
of the Home Guards overall is quite villainous, with the implication that these
are men who dodged frontline service to have the easier task of hunting down
deserters. Of course, the truth is somewhat more complex. Many deserters
actually formed criminal gangs and terrorized civilians at home. In fact, the
infamous scene where one of Teague’s goons (Charlie Hunnam before he was a
bigger star) tortures a woman by jumping on her fingers, trapped between fence
rails, was actually done in real life to capture a pair of dangerous
deserters-turned violent bandits. Still, the Home Guard could get really nasty
in more Unionist areas, and one infamous incident occurred in western North
Carolina.
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| Teague (Ray Winstone) |
The Shelton Laurel Massacre occurred early in 1863. In response to Unionist raiders, Lieutenant-Colonel James Keith of the 64th North Carolina led a search for the raiders. Along the way his men tortured and even killed both confirmed and suspected Unionists, many of them women, until they finally rounded up fifteen Unionist men. On the way back, in response to an escape attempt, they executed the remaining prisoners without trial. Frazier borrowed many of the horrid moments for Cold Mountain, and these make it into the movie, though with the culprits and victims changed (for example, a Union cavalryman tying a woman to a pole while leaving her baby exposed on the winter ground).
One last thing to talk about is the
opening battle scene, based on one of my favorite Civil War events to study
(which is why I spend two paragraphs on it). In the novel Inman is wounded at
the Siege of Petersburg, but mostly reflects on the Battle of Fredericksburg.
For the purposes of a clearer narrative, Minghella instead zeroed in on a short
section on the Battle of the Crater. After the bloody Overland Campaign, the
Union Army of the Potomac found itself drawn into a protracted trench warfare
outside the important rail junction of Petersburg. The commander of a regiment
composed of Pennsylvania coal miners came up with the idea of tunneling under
the Rebel line and detonating an explosive. General Ambrose Burnside, his
superior, liked the idea and with the approval of Generals George Meade and
Ulysses Grant planned to exploit the explosion with his Ninth Corps. It was a
brilliant plan undone by politics involving a black division in the Ninth
Corps, and the resultant Battle of the Crater on July 30, 1864, turned into a
disaster for the Union.
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| (https://moviesalamark.com/2018/05/28/cold-mountain/) |
The movie’s staging of the mine’s detonation is awesome, showing the unearthly experience the Confederates around it had. Then, with the backing of “Idumea” by the Sacred Harp Singers, we get a hellish red-tinged battle scene, with literal Romanian soldiers as the combatants. The battle shows some research, but is also somewhat inaccurate thanks to its simplification. The Union soldiers are shown charging right into the Crater when in fact it there was also fighting in the trenches around it. Confederates actually did throw bayonet-affixed rifles like spears into the packed mass of trapped Federals, but the movie only shows Inman’s Cherokee Indian comrade do it, so viewers might think it’s a cartoonish depiction of a Native American reverting to his people’s old way of fighting. Actually, there were Native Americans at the battle, but they were the Union Indians of Company K, 1st Michigan Sharpshooters. Though the battle is over-simplified, one must remember that it’s a “war is hell” moment to show the toll that fighting and death is having on Inman. I do think the Battle of the Crater deserves its own devoted movie getting into all the strategy and other details.
I love this movie and think it almost flawless. Really, the only significant criticism I have is that when Inman and Ada finally get reunited, the movie actually gets pretty boring for a few minutes, especially with an unnecessary sex scene. Cold Mountain wonderfully mixes great acting and filmmaking with accurate historical tidbits. This might be heresy for cinephiles, but I much prefer this to Gone with the Wind as a southern home front film.
Rating: 9/10
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