"Cold Mountain"

[tarragon918]

Okay, the movie is coming out on Christmas Day, but has anyone else read the book? I had picked it up this past spring at my favorite second-hand bookstore and tried to start it but it didn’t catch my interest (and admittedly with my Mom being so ill I was just too distracted already), so I put it down, not picking it up again until late summer. It did take a bit to get into the story, but once it got going (and I got used to the switching back and forth between points of view), I really got to enjoying it.

I’m not sure how faithful the movie will prove to be, though. Nicole Kidman and Jude Law portray the main characters, with Renee Zellwigger (sp?) the other major character in the cast. I am looking forward to seeing the movie; it’s set in western North Carolina (that’s where Cold Mountain is, in the Smokies I think) and the scenery alone should be breathtaking, imho. Don’t want to give too much away about the plot, but it’s set in the Civil War. The author did an excellent job of portraying the time yet still making it interesting to the reader.

[Caprese]

Doesn’t happen very often, but I think this could be one of those occasions where I like the movie better than the book. (One example was The English Patient, I preferred the movie to the novel.)
Don’t get me wrong, I did not detest Cold Mountain, the book, but I thought the ending was a bit of a cop-out.
I really like Kidman and Law and look forward to seeing the cinematic version of Cold Mountain.

[AuntiePam]

Kidman was on Leno last night. She said they did a lot of filming in Rumania. (And she looked great.)

I’ve read the book, but it’s been awhile and I don’t recall details. Have only seen a couple of short trailers, including the one on Leno last night. It looks promising, might be a fine movie, but I’m thinking they’re not sticking too close to the book, from what I’ve seen.

[vivalostwages]

I read the book and don’t remember much about it…Probably bad timing. I’ll read it again, but I’m definitely seeing the movie and taking my mom too.

Nicole Kidman would look gorgeous even if she were wearing nothing but a filthy burlap bag full of holes.

Ditto Jude Law.

[tarragon918]

My poor brain can’t remember the -names- of the main characters now (yes, I’m a mess I know), but the book would switch from telling the man’s story to telling the woman’s story. The women characters were a bit atypical for women from that time, I’m thinking–except that there probably were many women like that!

The story really got to me; I finished it one night, staying up until 3 am or so. It was romantic but certainly not in a maudlin way. I was sad when I finished it; I felt like I wanted to find another book like it. I will definitely be seeing the movie over the holiday.

[HPL]

I read the book and liked it, and my mother and grandmother read it as well(unfortunatly, I can’t discuss it with grandma, who’s starting to lose her memory).

My mother isn’t sure if she wants to see it, being disturbed by the fact the media keeps referring to it as “Nicole Kidman’s new movie”, when I seem to remember the Male character(being played by Jude Law) having just as much, if not more, of a role to play. I hope they didn’t butcher it.

I’m not sure what Caprese means when he/she says the ending was a cop out. Then again, the ending is somewhat vague, so I’d have to ask what Caprese saw the final chapter to mean before I could respond.

[Equipoise]

*Originally posted by HPL *
**My mother isn’t sure if she wants to see it, being disturbed by the fact the media keeps referring to it as “Nicole Kidman’s new movie”, when I seem to remember the Male character(being played by Jude Law) having just as much, if not more, of a role to play. I hope they didn’t butcher it.
**

Well, it is Nicole Kidman’s new movie, and the marketing department is using that as an angle to get people who aren’t familiar with the book to see it. Jude Law is one of the finest actors around, but he’s not exactly a household name. Unfortunately. Maybe this movie will help remedy that.

Here’s what Peter Travers had to say about it when he chose it as #5 on his 10 Best Movies of 2003

5 Cold Mountain
Directed by Anthony Minghella

This is one stunner of a movie. Charles Frazier’s lofty novel – it’s really The Odyssey set during the Civil War – could have been one of those dust-dry film versions of “great literature.” (Remember the botch job on Snow Falling on Cedars?) But gifted director Anthony Minghella (The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley), who wrote the well-judged screenplay, gives the story a hot-blooded urgency. Cold Mountain has it all: love, war, humor, suspense and a probing sense of what it takes for a divided America to heal its wounds. It’s a triumph for Minghella, who casts the film with a keen eye. Jude Law gives a breakthrough star performance as Inman, a wounded Confederate soldier so tormented by the fighting – the opening battle scene is authentically harrowing – that he heads home on foot to the woman he left behind. She is Ada, and as embodied and eroticized by Nicole Kidman she is someone well worth the hike to North Carolina. Kidman lights up the screen. She and Law fire up the love story at the heart of this intimate epic. A remarkable feat, because the movie, like the book, mostly keeps these two characters apart. Inman’s travels, interacting with characters such as a lonely war widow (Natalie Portman) and a lecherous preacher (Philip Seymour Hoffman), are interspersed with Ada working the farm with Ruby, a rough-spoken hellraiser played by a roaringly comic Renee Zellweger, who steals every scene she’s in. But even Ruby has secrets. The specter of war haunts Cold Mountain, but you remember it for the heat of its romantic yearning and the mysteries that wrap themselves around you until you’re lost in another world.

[BiblioCat]

I’m looking forward to it.
I loved the book.

Rene Zellweger is not how I pictured the character of Ruby, though. Not at all. Wasn’t she supposed to be half-black in the book? Her father was white and her mother was black, right? Or am I think of another book?

[Equipoise]

I just read this from David Ansen of Newsweek. It’s not an official review, but it sounds like one. In this article, he talks about Cold Moutain, The Last Samurai and The Return of the King.

…
What the makers of these three martially minded holiday epics couldn’t have foreseen was that their images of war and destruction would be fraught with a daily-headline resonance. This is particularly true of Anthony Minghella’s stunning, stately adaptation of Charles Frazier’s Civil War odyssey “Cold Mountain,” the one film that addresses the psychological impact of war. With vivid precision it shows what war can do to a person, a community, a country. It’s the story of Inman (Jude Law), a disillusioned, wounded Confederate soldier who rises from his hospital bed determined to walk home—no matter how long it takes—to North Carolina and Ada (Nicole Kidman), the woman he loves yet hardly knows.

Minghella grounds the high romanticism of the love story in the bloody muck of hand-to-hand combat. He opens his movie with the Battle of the Crater, a nightmarish encounter in Petersburg, Va., that left thousands dead. It’s not in the book, but it brilliantly evokes the inferno Inman is determined to escape. Minghella intercuts the battle with the bucolic town of Cold Mountain three years earlier, when the taciturn Inman first met Ada Monroe, a sheltered Southern belle. The sparks between Law and Kidman are palpable, the contrast between her pastel gentility and the brutality of Petersburg as stark as a steel blade.

    “Cold Mountain” is a movie of episodes, and Minghella pulls off dazzling set pieces: he knows how to infuse violence with emotion, so it never seems gratuitous. If “Cold Mountain” runs the risk of self-importance, the arrival of Renee Zellweger as the spunky, dirt-encrusted drifter Ruby solves that problem. A gal who knows her way around a farm, she moves in with the hapless Ada—left to her own devices after her father’s death—and teaches her how to survive. Ada, in turn, teaches Ruby there are more things in life than ripping the heads off roosters. Zellweger can push the “Annie Get Your Gun” swagger too hard, but she mixes it up with sharp stabs of honest emotion. It’s a daring, delicious performance.

    Kidman deftly captures both Ada’s diffidence and her determination, though I wish she didn’t always look fresh out of the beauty parlor. In any case, it’s Law’s understated, mesmerizing performance that carries the film and gives it its soul, much as he carries his life-sustaining vision of Ada in his hopeful heart. As he did in “The English Patient,” Minghella artfully weds movie-movie romanticism with a dark historical vision. The man knows how to cast a spell.

[Caprese]

*Originally posted by HPL *
**

I’m not sure what Caprese means when he/she says the ending was a cop out. Then again, the ending is somewhat vague, so I’d have to ask what Caprese saw the final chapter to mean before I could respond. **

I’m a she.
I don’t want to spoil the ending for those who have not read the book, and it is hard for me to discuss this without giving things away.
I felt that Cold Mountain was well written, but it was almost as if the ending was stuck on by another author.
Let me try a spoiler box.

I don’t need tidy, happy endings, but I felt that the novel was a bit of slog for the abrupt and, for me, unsatisfactory finale.
To me,Inman’s death just didn’t sit well with the rest of the story.

[Bruce_Daddy]

I have nothing to add but I want to brag on myself. I’ve spent the night several times on top of Cold Mountain by myself, no other hikers/campers up there. It’s a very “religeous” experience to view a sunrise up there. Cold Mountain may be my favorite place in the world.

I can’t wait to see the movie.

Here’s a web cam that isn’t working right now but may be in the future.

[HPL]

*Originally posted by Caprese *
**I’m a she.
I don’t want to spoil the ending for those who have not read the book, and it is hard for me to discuss this without giving things away.
I felt that Cold Mountain was well written, but it was almost as if the ending was stuck on by another author.
Let me try a spoiler box.

I don’t need tidy, happy endings, but I felt that the novel was a bit of slog for the abrupt and, for me, unsatisfactory finale.
To me,Inman’s death just didn’t sit well with the rest of the story.
**

Okay.

Actually, I felt it was appropriate. As many times as Inman was shot and escaped death in the book, I would have felt cheated if once again he survived being shot yet again. I was starting to get the feeling that Inman was “The Man with no name” as many times as he survived bullet wounds and the way those shootouts turned out(particulary the last one where he kills almost all of them singlehandedly)

So the final chapter, given the circumstances of the chapter before that, was somewhat appropriate, IMHO. However, I would not be opposed to things turning out differently at that point just before the final chapter

[Stoid]

I was much like the OP, it was a hard slog through the first few chapters, but I stuck it out. I was certainly glad I did because I ended up adoring it, and I’m terribly afraid they are going to screw it up. And I don’t think the ending is a copout at all, and I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that they wimp out on the ending.

[Caprese]

*Originally posted by Stoid *
**I was much like the OP, it was a hard slog through the first few chapters, but I stuck it out. I was certainly glad I did because I ended up adoring it, and I’m terribly afraid they are going to screw it up. And I don’t think the ending is a copout at all, and I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that they wimp out on the ending. **

See, I think the way the book ended was the true wimp out.

Abruptly yet ambiguously killing Inman off like that was perhaps supposed to have some greater meaning, but for me it just felt like the author did not know what to do about Inman and Ada. But whatever.

I’ll read the reviews and judge from there; I never worry too much about how they compare to the book because I know that I just won’t go see them if they sound awful. And as I said before, it doesn’t happen very often but every now and then, I actually prefer the film to the book.