Okay, I saw the movie last night. Here’s my report (no spoilers).
To begin with: I have not read Charles Frazier’s book Cold Mountain from which the movie is adapted. I have no idea which specific incidents or characters are elided, compressed, expanded, or eliminated. I can make a few guesses, based on the content and style, but in the end every movie must be judged on its own merits.
Anthony Minghella’s film Cold Mountain is good — but it is not great. It is well-acted, but in some cases, I believe, the characters are ill-conceived for the screen. The cinematography is gorgeous, and those concerned about Romania standing in for the American South should rest easy; but this occasionally overwhelming beauty is, in my mind, part of what doesn’t work about the movie. I’m not saying the movie as a whole doesn’t work, because it’s a quality piece of filmmaking. However, it fails to reach the heights to which it aspires, and is flawed in certain respects.
The main problem, as I see it, is the opacity of the two central characters, Ada and Inman. Again, I have not read the book. I don’t know how Frazier handled his protagonists, and I don’t know how the movie’s treatment of the characters will work for someone familiar with the book. But as a viewer, I found the two leads singularly uninteresting.
The problem, as I see it, is that their story represents something of an existential dilemma. Ada and Inman have a very brief and very limited courtship, and then he goes off to war for years and years. We are expected to believe that they pine for each other over this lengthy period, despite the nearly nonexistent romance that preceded their separation, and their desire for reunion is supposed to be the emotional engine that drives the story. The existential conflict, it seems to me, is that each character focuses on the other to provide hope and meaning for themselves, and then undergoes such hardship that everything else is stripped away. When you define yourself by one primary characteristic — in this case, by the fervent hope for requited love upon reunion — and then you not only lose everything else, but also risk losing that single, cherished central aspect of your identity, then who are you, really?
Because I haven’t read the book, I can’t say for sure that’s what the source is about, but I can say that if it is, it would be a lot more successful on the page than it is onscreen. In a book, you can dive into a character’s psyche, exploring their thoughts and emotions internally; an existential dilemma is wonderful fodder for the novelist. But in a film, we have to see people in action. Somebody sitting doing nothing is just sitting doing nothing; we can’t read their mind. The filmmaker must give us additional clues as to what’s going on inside them, clues in the form of behavior and activity: We learn who they are inside by seeing what they do.
The single-mindedness of the two protagonists in the film, in consequence, is not enough to make us care about them, or at least it wasn’t for me. After a while, the characters didn’t even really merit names: We find ourselves looking at Walking Man moving slowly toward Waiting Woman. As I said, this can be profound on the page, but in film it gives us nothing to hang on to, and the characters become ciphers. Jude Law and Nicole Kidman work very hard (and their dialect work is perfectly acceptable, Law’s more than Kidman’s, so no big criticisms there), but their characters are primarily reactive. They have their central objective, and they never stray except to deal with momentary distractions. Once Inman decides he’s going home, his story is mostly a straight line, with pauses while he climbs over a fleeting obstacle: he gets briefly captured, but then escapes and continues on his path; he meets a desperate widow and wonders about his quest, but then helps her and continues on his path; and so on. The same can be said for Ada, who sits and waits and tries not to starve and sits and waits and fends off the advances of the local constabulary and sits and waits and takes in a boarder and sits and waits and watches the boarder cope with her wayward father and sits and waits some more.
I’m focusing on the existential conflict, because based on the rest of the story I’m willing to guess that it’s a central theme of the book; Minghella’s treatment is respectful, bordering on reverential, so it seems as though he’s trying to be faithful to his material (the downer ending, which I won’t describe in detail, testifies to this). Now, it’s quite possible that this isn’t the case, that the book is about something else entirely; as I said, I haven’t read it. But if that’s so, then Minghella has created the crisis of identity for himself as a guiding theme, because it’s central to the movie. Echoing the ache of the two protagonists, we have a reverend who violates his very oath and is stripped of his office; a band of ostensible lawmen who misuse their authority; and in general a feeling that the country as a whole has been so badly wounded it’s lost its sense of itself. When Union soldiers who haven’t eaten in days are terrorizing a lonely widow to give up her food stores, or when young rowdies are dancing in glee because “we finally got our war,” one gets the sense of a nation adrift, cut loose from its moorings, the same way the protagonists have been. It’s a literate theme, to be sure, and well worth exploring: but in the cinematic form, making one’s central characters the foremost exemplars of the motif is, in my eyes, something of a miscalculation.
So with that in mind, thank God for the supporting cast.
These are the people Inman and Ada are reacting to, and almost to a one they are vibrant, fully human creations. Renee Zellweger walks away with the film as Ruby, a forceful whirlwind of energy who dumps herself into Ada’s life; Zellweger’s performance is multilayered, unexpected, and both funny and moving, and her total lack of self-consciousness juxtaposed with Kidman’s porcelain delicacy is exactly what the movie needs, scene after scene. Brendan Gleeson is wonderful as Ruby’s father, irresponsible and yet still likeable. Ray Winstone is a credible villain, playing the local lawman with his greedy eye on both Ada and her property. Giovanni Ribisi is a sleazy con artist; Philip Seymour Hoffman turns in another patented toothlessly comic villain; Natalie Portman, in just a few minutes, demonstrates how criminally she’s been misused by George Lucas’s tin-digital camera; and so on. In the supporting players, the film contains an almost embarrassing overabundance of glittering treasure.
And the physical production is quite impressive, both epic in scope and intimate in detail. The opening Civil War battle is simply huge, painting on an enormous canvas and yet not neglecting jarring closeups like the man whose clothes (and some of his skin) are blown off by a nearby explosion, or the soldier who can’t rise and fight because someone else’s foot is obliviously pushing his face into the bloody mud of the battlefield. The costumes are rough and unglamorous, the location shooting is assured, the editing is crisp, the dialogue is appropriate to the period and underplayed… This is, as I said, a thoroughly professional example of quality filmmaking.
There are minor missteps here and there. Jack White, of the White Stripes, is cast in a minor role for no reason I can discern. Melora Walters (she with the shy yet luminous closing smile in Magnolia) turns up in a tiny role as part of Giovanni Ribisi’s harem, possibly because she’s willing to do nudity, but it’s a little distracting how obviously the editor is forced to work around her, um, decidedly anachronistic cosmetic augmentations. And speaking of nudity, there’s a sex scene late in the film between Inman and Ada that is unnecessarily graphic, crossing over into Zalman King territory and taking us abruptly out of the movie. I don’t consider this a spoiler, by the way; c’mon, it’s a Hollywood movie, you know you can’t separate the leads and not have them come together at the end. This ain’t Umbrellas of Cherbourg, y’know. Anyway, the sex scene is obligatory, and its intended functional for emotional payoff is understandable, but the overt explictness of its execution is simply egregious.
A number of years ago, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly, a reviewer I normally loathe, scored a rare accurate comment when he referred to Jonathan Demme’s Beloved as a movie specifically “made to win awards.” Cold Mountain, it seems to me, is another. That it turns out quite a bit better than Beloved is to be lauded; that it isn’t nearly as good as it should be, or that it apparently thinks it is, is a disappointment. The film’s reverence for the source material spills over into reverence for itself, and with every sweeping vista, every long-held shot of wounded characters pondering their own alienation, we get a taste of the movie’s sense of mission, of importance. I don’t mind a self-important movie if it delivers the goods, and like I said above the crisis of identity in war is a completely valid and worthwhile topic to explore. I just think the movie has other problems that distract us from being able to focus on and absorb that theme.
It’s a thoughtful piece of work, and is a grown-up story with grown-up conflicts for grown-up audiences, which makes it a valuable departure in this era of lowest-common-denominator teen-chasing cinema. Unfortunately, to this viewer, at least, the black hole at the center of the film represented by the two people we’re supposed to care about most is a big problem, and keeps the movie from legitimately achieving greatness.