I have to take issue with Candida Clark on the merits of Cold Mountain, in particular with her assertion that it is a ‘great love story’. Much has been said about the on-screen chemistry between Jude Law and Nicole Kidman, to the extent that speculations have been made as to whether or not they ‘did it’ in real life. There was evidence of a lustful spark, although at times this appeared more like a mutual admiration for one another’s Oscar-chasing attempts at deep Southern accents. However the alchemy of their acting skills failed to pull off an authentic portrayal of love, which was more due to the script’s failure to provide them with a realistic opportunity of setting it ablaze.
Inman (Law) is instantly smitten by love for Ada (Kidman), who first catches sight of her while he helps build her Daddy’s church and she arrives on Cold Mountain looking as though she has just done a runner from a Henry James novel: here is a woman who practices her piano while being driven in a horse and cart. Ada reciprocates this love at first sight, swept away by Inman’s quaint, farm boy shyness. They have one awkward conversation, then war breaks out, with Inman announcing he’ll be heading off to fight with the rest of the boys. Without further ado, Ada is provoked into making the first move by handing him a book and a photo of herself for him to ogle at the front. They kiss, she promises to write, he promises to return, and for the next two hours, we are expected to pine for their reunion.
No sooner has Inman arrived at the battlefield, where of course he fights like a tiger, than he gets shot through the neck, concluding on recovery he couldn’t give a monkey’s for the Southern cause anyway. It’s love not war for Inman. However his Odyssean return to Cold Mountain involves ducking and diving the Home Guard – a motley crew of blood-lusting psychotic Hillbillies whose role it was to hunt down and kill Southern deserters. Inman nonetheless fends off death and temptation while exercising the moral judgment of Tolkein’s Frodo Baggins. Ada meanwhile gets back into Henry James mode and bamboozles Inman (and us, in the form of voice over) with heart twanging confessional love letters.
However Daddy (played by Donald Sutherland with a fixed evangelical grin) dies, and Ada is forced to roll up her sleeves and run Daddy’s farm along with the help of Ruby (played by Renée Zellweger, in the very best shit-kickin’, cabbage-pickin’, straw-chewin’, rooster-killin’, face-screwin’ performance she can muster). Ada in turn sheds her over-educated, cultured self for a more rustic version in the process.
Cinematic silence, empty gesture
Throughout Inman’s and Ada’s respective struggles, Minghella does present us with plenty of sumptuously cinematic depictions of the wrongs and the misery of war. However in doing so, he goes out of his way to avoid the political issue of slavery by sidelining Black Americans to non-speaking roles. Candida Clark’s defense for this deflection is that ‘this film is not about the politics of race which was central to the civil war’. But the civil war is nonetheless the backdrop to the film, and the fact that the key battle scene takes place at the famous siege of Petersburg, where black troops suffered the worst casualties of the Union army, would suggest that some evidence of their loss should be portrayed. If either Charles Frazier or Anthony Minghella had cared to read Geoffrey C Ward’s The Civil War, they may have come across (on page 315) a rebel private’s account of how the Confederate Army treated the 1,100 soldiers who surrendered: “White troops were allowed to surrender unmolested. But scores perhaps hundreds of black troops were killed as they tried to surrender, bayoneted or clubbed to death by Confederates shouting, “Take the white man! Kill the nigger!”
In the end, such a blatant oversight on Minghella’s part only serves to the detriment of his protagonists, whom we are meant to root for, and yet who need nonetheless to be judged in the socio-political context of their drama. By silencing the slaves, we never get to see how Inman and Ada truly relate to them in the flesh, which in Inman’s case, would have been in hand-to-hand combat at Petersburg.
Instead, Minghella whitewashes them with liberal gestures, from the heroic to the quaintly charitable. Both of them are nice to slaves from the outset. In a key bonding moment with Ada, Inman insists on carrying a tray of root beers for her that she had prepared for her Daddy’s slaves. He even goes so far as to heroically save a slave girl from being murdered by a preacher who had got her pregnant. Ada is absolved by freeing all her Daddy’s slaves at the outbreak of the war, thereby liberating her conscience (and ours) to concern itself with love.
Yet when Inman finally arrives on Cold Mountain, and he and Ada get to share their first post war intimate scene, like a teenager rebuffing the advances of her beau on her third date, she suddenly comes to the realisation that they hardly know one another. “Just a few moments”, she tells him (I counted five). Inman’s tacky response is straight out of the Latin Lover’s manual, which deserved to be met with a tearful groan. “A thousand moments”, he insists, “each one like a bag of tiny diamonds.”
The diamond moments don’t end there. When Ada and Ruby are under attack from the local branch of the Home Guard, Inman comes to the rescue. However there is one particularly sadistic young gun Inman fails to take out. Once Inman catches up with him, he displays infinite mercy, telling him to head on home and off the mountain. The boy refuses, stating in his very best Minghella Hillbilly that “there’s one thing I’ve got on my side. The confidence of youth.” Surely, anyone who has taken on board ‘the confidence of youth’ would by the same token understand its futility.
However the boy can be forgiven for the artifice of his dialogue (in my view, a prolonged, hell-breaking ‘yeeee haaaa’ would have been more apt), since his ‘confidence of youth’ enables him to pull a hidden gun on Inman, whereupon both shoot one another and die. Thank the Lordy, say I, since I don’t think I could have stomached leaving the cinema with the prospect of Nicole and Jude growin’ corn and eatin’ pie in a little house on the Prairie.
To read Candida Clark’s review of Cold Mountain click here.
