[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on
Cold Mountain
The English filmmaker Anthony Minghella may have a weakness for yarns about lovelorn soldiers who soak up prodigious punishment while struggling to reunite with sweethearts. A similar quest sputters and slogs along in "Cold Mountain," a prestige groaner derived from a National Book Award-winning novel by Charles Frazier, who evoked the Civil War as a grisly, sinister obstacle to survival and true love. Jude Law is cast as a Confederate soldier named Inman, a veteran of battles at Fredericksburg, Sharpsburg and Petersburg who goes absent without leave from a military hospital in Richmond in the closing months of 1864. His destination is a hometown in the mountains of far western North Carolina, where he hopes to find a transplanted Charleston, S.C., belle, Ada Monroe (Nicole Kidman), whom he had begun to court as war was declared in the spring of 1861.
In certain respects it is easier to warm to the long-distance heartaches of Inman and Ada, who share attachments to the same locale as well as an unconsummated passion for each other. Inman and Ada are a humble, compatibly naive romantic match, erotically stymied.
Inman and Ada have loneliness and frustration in common. They also confront identical menaces as the hero nears Cold Mountain. A depraved Home Guard posse, bossed by Ray Winstone as a brawny, ever-expedient wretch called Teague, revels in cold blooded murder.
The movie begins by visualizing a battle so appalling - Petersburg in the aftermath of the demolition that created an enormous crater in the Confederate trenches - that Inman's perilous farewell to arms, motivated in part by a pleading letter from Ada, is a case of desertion that appears well earned and self-explanatory.
Unfortunately, the Petersburg trauma is dissipated by the story's abject dependence on Teague's recurrent, consistently repulsive depredations. It is as if Minghella feared the plot....
