FILM

Cold Mountain
(from New Yorker)

In many ways, 2003, with its extensive dead zones, was a terrible year for big Hollywood movies. But it will also be remembered as a year in which a group of remarkable large-scale productions hit the theatres in its last couple of months like brilliant guests arriving late at a party. Among them are Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River,” Peter Weir’s “Master and Commander,” and, now, Anthony Minghella’s “Cold Mountain,” which is not only a stunning popular entertainment but also, if you’re keeping score, a much better movie about the South during the Civil War than “Gone with the Wind”—visionary, erotic, and tragic where the older movie is flossy, merely ambitious and self-important.

Minghella’s adaptation of Charles Frazier’s 1997 novel is about the backwash of warfare—the lawless, scrappy life that struggles to take shape behind the lines in an atmosphere of uneasy freedom. The frame of the story is simple enough. In 1861, in Cold Mountain, a town in the North Carolina Blue Ridge range, a young man known as Inman (Jude Law) meets Ada (Nicole Kidman), a beautiful and genteel minister’s daughter. After a few awkward encounters and one heart-stopping kiss, Inman, along with all the other young men in Cold Mountain, runs off to fight the war. Three gruesome years later, badly hurt and with his spirit in shreds, he deserts his company after the battle of the Crater, at Petersburg, and tries to make his way home to a woman he barely knows. Inman says that the war has destroyed him, but, in our eyes, he has gained in understanding and become a man. At the same time, Ada, whose father has died, leaving her with a three-hundred-acre farm to run, has put some color in her face and some fight in her belly. The movie is held together by the idea that two callow young people, inspired by a half-remembered but exalted image of each other, can grow more powerful as everything disintegrates around them.

An Englishman of Italian descent, Anthony Minghella has had his ups and downs over the years. Patricia Highsmith’s nasty thriller material in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” was too calculating and narrow-focussed for him; the director of such dramas of infatuation and longing as “Truly, Madly, Deeply” and “The English Patient” is a star-dazed dreamer, and Frazier’s richly textured novel is more his kind of thing. “Cold Mountain” is charged with scenes of yearning and irrational faith—flickering portents glimpsed at the bottom of a well; a blind man making prophecies—yet Minghella brings off this cheesy stuff so poetically that he cuts away the mold. He is neither a gusher nor a mystic nor a decorator; he has the strength of a true romantic imagination, the conviction that realism needs a push to yield up its deepest terrors and glories. As the movie shifts back and forth between Inman and Ada, they send formal letters to each other that are like notes in bottles bobbing in the sea. Do such notes consecrate the water in some way? In “Cold Mountain,” they offer grace to the tormented landscapes that Inman tromps across. Minghella’s sense of spectacle is both more vivid and more abrupt than in the past. At Petersburg, the Union Army plants explosives below the Confederate positions. When the dynamite is ignited, the men are tossed in the air and torn apart, including Inman, who lands with a thud and is buried in silence beneath mounds of dirt. This cataclysm is followed by the charge of the Union Army, thousands of men enshrouded in gray smoke hurling themselves against the Confederate bulwarks like the massed bodies of the damned in a Renaissance painting. The style might be called hallucinatory realism—high-flown yet filthy with the mire and blood of war.

After the battle, Inman escapes to a different kind of hell, the open country behind the lines, and the movie becomes a picaresque—an American Odyssey crossed, perhaps, with Frazier’s or Minghella’s memory of those samurai narratives in which warriors trying to get home are set upon by bands of marauders. In this case, the marauders are a vicious group of Southern freebooters—the Home Guard—searching for deserters and terrorizing their families. As Inman avoids these corn-liquored furies, he undergoes one physical and moral trial after another. He has an ambiguous encounter with a terrified group of slaves in a ruined cornfield. He runs into a fornicating minister (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and a backwoods scoundrel (Giovanni Ribisi), who lures Inman and the minister to his house, offers them women, and then turns them over to the Home Guard. As Inman and Ada, two chastely high-minded lovers, attempt to reach each other, predatory sex runs riot in hidden places.

Shaping these vignettes to bring out all their grotesque and boisterous life (and there isn’t a dud among them), Minghella demonstrates a talent for violence that he’s never suggested before. Even though I knew alarming things were coming, I was repeatedly startled by the power of his staging. There’s a near-sickening moment in which Inman and a group of other deserters, chained together like slaves, are shot, and Inman tries to drag the bodies of the others down a muddy hill. Yet Minghella is rooted in show business; he has given us the strongest kind of relief, filling out the vignettes with exceptional actors—including Eileen Atkins, as a witchy mountain woman who takes care of Inman when he’s half dead, and Brendan Gleeson, as a fiddle player whose scratchy tunes signal a return to life midway through the movie.

While Inman struggles to get home, Ada’s farm is revived by young Ruby (Renée Zellweger), an arrogant interloper with a strong back. Prune-faced and bossy, Zellweger stomps into the movie like a junior Mammy Yokum. At first she seems to be doing an easy comic turn—but then she grabs a rooster by the neck and breaks it with a snap of her wrist. Ruby teaches Ada to haul, plow, and plant, and to defend herself against the marauders, transforming her pale young mistress into a formidable woman. For a while, we seem to be watching the birth of a classless, all-female Southern society, but the romantic pull between the letter-writing lovers is too strong: the structure of the movie demands that they reunite, like the halves of a drawbridge falling into place.

In recent years, that male beauty Jude Law has developed into a hardworking actor who is willing to take big chances. At the beginning of “Cold Mountain,” Inman is a lazy, sensual boy; his consciousness develops slowly, and Law’s eyes, as the movie goes on, grow more inquiring and expressive, as if he could see clearly only at the end. And Law suffers without making us suffer for him. He does what only a good actor who is also a movie star can do—he makes the actions of his character pointedly individual and, at the same time, impersonal enough to resonate as a common desire. Nicole Kidman was miscast in “The Human Stain”; here, with her flashing eyes and stalk-like body, she’s on top of her game again as a minister’s daughter devoted to duty but eager to break out. Although Kidman has been in movies for twenty years, she seems utterly fresh, as if she’d just been hatched somewhere deep in the most extravagant moviegoer’s imagination.

“Cold Mountain” is strange in one way—the issue of slavery is barely mentioned, and black people are few and far between. One could point out that there weren’t many slaves in the plantation-free mountains, but that isn’t quite a sufficient answer. We never know, for instance, what the boys of Cold Mountain are running off to fight for, what Inman means when he says he was “lied to.” The absence is a flaw, but it isn’t a critical one. The backwash of war is as great a subject for art as it is a terrible experience to endure, and Minghella’s style of larger-than-life realism is right for a historical moment in which the fantastic becomes everyday matter. “Cold Mountain” insists that you respond to it fully. You either shut it out or go all the way into it and come out feeling both shaken and wildly happy.