"The Civil War, Without All the Sepia Tint," New York Times, December 21, 2003

Tintype of Nicole Kidman, made on the set of "Cold Mountain" by Stephen Berkman, a photographer who has helped preserve the medium. His photographs can be seen in the Civil War-era film, which opens on Dec. 25. Introduced in 1853, the tintype was produced on a metallic sheet (not tin), coated with collodion and sensitized just before use.
Anthony Minghella's "Cold Mountain," which opens Thursday, is on a lot of levels pretty faithful to Charles Frazier's. The novel's many passionate devotees won't be able to complain about liberties with the text. But they ‹ and fans of Civil War lit in general ‹ may be disconcerted all the same, because the movie doesn't feel much like the book, and the differences go beyond the usual discrepancies between screen and page. The movie isn't irreverent, exactly ‹ or in any way dismissive of the horrors of the Civil War ‹ but it injects healthy doses of production value into an era that we have a tendency to see only in sepia, as something that happened long ago, recorded in tintypes and antique-sounding prose. Ken Burns is probably responsible for a lot of this sepiafication. His magisterial 1990 PBS documentary put the Civil War back on the national curriculum in a way that it probably hadn't been since the end of the 19th century, but it also turned the war into a kind of still-life diorama, slowly unrolling to mournful fiddle music and Shelby Foote's syrupy vowels. Something similar happens in a lot of recent Civil War fiction. The shoe-leather books, you could call them: not just "Cold Mountain," about a wounded, shell-shocked Confederate soldier who deserts his hospital bed and walks 300 miles from Virginia to North Carolina in order to return to the woman he loves and who loves him, even though they've hardly spoken to each other, but also Jeffrey Lent's "In the Fall," about a Yankee soldier who, in the company of an escaped slave, hikes all the way from Virginia back to his native Vermont, and Paulette Jiles's "Enemy Women," about a young Missouri woman who is wrongfully imprisoned by the Yankees, escapes and walks (disguised as a man) all the way from St. Louis back to the Ozarks, where she too reunites with her true love, a Union major, who has meanwhile walked all the way from Mobile.

All these books (and "Cold Mountain" especially) are written in a slow and stately, biblically cadenced prose ‹ the literary equivalent of the slow Burnsian camera-pan. It's a voice that's vaguely 19th century-sounding but in a kind of hushed, earnest way that gives no hint, say, of Whitman's expansive excitability or of the terse, modern precision of U. S. Grant, possibly the greatest writer of the Civil War era. The reason, in part, is that these novels take as their premise the notion that people back then were fundamentally different from us ‹ different not only in the clothes they wore and the food they ate, but different in their souls and in their relation to the world. The characters in these books ‹ the good characters, that is ‹ are natural and uncorrupted, in tune with seasons and with the land, for which they bear an almost religious reverence. They're walking away as fast they can not just from war but from the city ‹ from an America that is rapidly transforming itself into the place we now live. There were people then who really did think this way, but even by the late 19th century this kind of innocent relation to the world had become a kind of myth. Thoreau, for example, wanted to be just such a person ‹ and felt, decades before the Civil War, that he was already too late. In Mr. Frazier's 1997 novel, what was in Thoreau a sense of wistful tardiness has become full-blown nostalgia ‹ our nostalgia, for a world that never entirely existed ‹ and that surely helps account for the huge popularity of the book. The movie is not nearly as profound ‹ or profound-seeming ‹ but it does something equally valuable. Instead of carrying us back in time, it slyly smuggles the novel forward. It gives the book a not unwelcome shot of Technicolor and star quality.

Tintype of Jude Law, made on the set of "Cold Mountain" by Stephen Berkman.
"Cold Mountain" is not just a great-looking movie ‹ it's a self-consciously great-looking movie. It was shot mostly in Romania, because the director didn't think that North Carolina (the actual setting) was photogenic enough. The war scenes are especially gorgeous and thrilling, full of billowing flags, flying bodies, spectacular shell bursts, dramatic smoky skyscapes. There are frames that could almost have been painted by Delacroix or Gιricault. This kind of visual overload is a Minghella trademark, of course; in this movie, as in the equally beautiful "English Patient," he sometimes is as interested in how things look as in what they mean. (And here the look occasionally verges on kitsch: the prewar scenes of the little hamlet of Cold Mountain bear a precious, overly luminous resemblance to the oeuvre of the great mall artist, Thomas Kinkade.) Charles Frazier's novel is sometimes called a modern-day "epic," but it's written not in an epic style but an earnest, painstaking one. The movie, on the other hand, is larger than life, in the way that epics tend to be, and (except that there are virtually no black people in "Cold Mountain") it's a throwback, in a way, to the greatest Civil War epic of all, "Gone With the Wind."

The film actually spends much more time on the battlefield than the book does. Inman, the story's protagonist, can't get away from the war fast enough. But the movie lingers there, and, tellingly, it transposes the scene of Inman's battlefield trauma from Fredricksburg, Va., to the Crater, at Petersburg, a later and far more horrific engagement, in which the Federal troops first mined underneath the Confederate encampment and blew it up, and then found themselves trapped in the enormous chasm their blast had excavated. These war scenes evoke, all at once, the trenches of World War I, the tunnels of Vietnam and (in a mushroom cloud billowing up from the initial blast) Hiroshima and the cold war. They're a not so subtle reminder that the Civil War was the first truly modern conflict ‹ the first in which machine guns were fired and iron-clad naval vessels deployed, and the first to inflict large-scale collateral damage upon civilians.

But the real difference between the book and the movie becomes apparent the moment Nicole Kidman (as Ada, Inman's sweetheart) appears on screen, looking far better than anyone ever looked in the 19th century. (She is newly arrived in Cold Mountain from Charleston, S.C., we learn, and clearly the hair and makeup people in Charleston are very advanced.) Unlike "The Hours," last year, in which Ms. Kidman put on a fake nose and frumpy clothes to impersonate Virginia Woolf, "Cold Mountain" makes no attempt to dim her radiance, and her beauty actually clarifies what in the book is a plot problem. Now, at last, we understand why Inman, though he has only met her a couple of times, can't get Ada out of his head.

Jude Law plays Inman, and in the course of the movie he, or his makeup person, performs a feat of metamorphosis. As he undergoes his series of Homeric travails, he becomes thin and haggard, his beard grows, and he turns before our eyes into one of those hollow-eyed vets in a Mathew Brady photograph. Near the end of the movie, when Ada at first fails to recognize Inman, it's entirely convincing. As Ada undergoes her transformation, on the other hand ‹ as she throws off her fussy, Charleston-bred manners, literally lets her hair down and learns to become a farmer and handywoman ‹ she glows even more. She exudes confidence, and she turns, before our eyes, not into one of those haggard farm wives you see in Walker Evans photographs, but into a proto Martha Stewart.

In the movie, as in the book, the agent of Ada's transformation is Ruby Thewes, the backwoods jack-of-all-trades, played here by Renιe Zellweger, who at first, with her scrunched-up expressions and Grand Ole Opry accent, seems to come not only from another era but from another kind of movie altogether (from the remake of "Beverly Hillbillies," perhaps). But her feisty, hyperactive performance grows on you, and eventually she and Ms. Kidman steal the movie and turn it into a kind of female buddy flick.

In the book, Ruby's re-education of Ada is partly moral and spiritual, and under Ruby's tutelage Ada comes to understand nature as a kind of metaphor, full of signs and symbols. In the movie, Ada's education is much more practical, as she grows in competency and confidence. Inman, meanwhile, is off on his odyssey, and the Homeric episodes (the loosely adapted versions of Circe, the Sirens, etc.) work less well here than they do in the book ‹ partly because they're inconsistent with the down-to-earth tone of the Ada scenes. The Homeric stuff is played partly for laughs ‹ the Sirens, for example, are not scarily seductive, but just dumb and slutty, like the farmer's daughters in an old traveling-salesman joke ‹ and partly with a kind of folksy portentousness that doesn't work much better. The plot doesn't require a great deal of Odysseus-like wiliness on Inman's part; his task isn't so much to grow in wisdom and experience as simply to endure, and to grow sick of violence (something that Homer's hero never loses his taste for). Inman is a man of few words to begin with, and the movie doesn't give Jude Law many chances to talk. His job is mostly to look soulful, and to lose weight and grow facial hair. When he finally meets up with Ada and Ruby, he's clearly broken, and no match for them. They look at each other and you know what they're thinking: Do we really need this guy? Well yes, actually. They need him ‹ or Ada does, anyway ‹ for the obligatory sex scene, both steamy and "artistic." But more than the book, which dwells on the senselessness of war and the corrosive effects of violence, the movie hints at an upside. The Civil War, like World War II, empowered a generation of women. The movie actually loads the case a little, since none of the male actors come close to grabbing the screen the way Ms. Kidman and Ms. Zellweger do. They seem like thoroughly modern creatures, so quick and vivid that the on-screen Ada, for example, bears no resemblance to the little tintype of her that Inman carries around. It looks impossibly quaint and old-fashioned ‹ like something, come to think of it, out of a Ken Burns film.  

By Charles McGrath



Cold Mountain Leaves Out the Role of Blacks in the Civil War

Erik Todd Dellums, a Brown University graduate and actor and son of former Rep. Ronald V. Dellums, writing in the SF Chronicle (Jan. 4, 2004):

I am an African American, professional actor, semiotician and film lover. I am, therefore, underemployed, underappreciated and an afterthought in Hollywood. I am also a man who rarely sees an accurate depiction of black people and American history in film and on television. It's something I've grown used to, but now I'm mad as hell and not going to take it anymore! All people who truly care about honest representations of American history in Hollywood should boycott the heavily promoted "Cold Mountain." At a cost of $80-plus million and sporting a stellar cast and crew, this film adaptation of Charles Frazier's acclaimed best-seller opened Christmas Day and is being touted as the film to beat at the Academy Awards. It has generated glowing reviews for Disney, Miramax and all involved. It is also a sham, a slap in the face of African Americans whose ancestors gave their lives in the Civil War, fighting for true freedom (take that, President Bush) from the most heinous form of slavery known to modern man: the American slavery system. How could a three-hour film depicting life in the heart of Virginia and North Carolina during the Civil War use only momentary shots of black people picking cotton and a few black actors portraying runaway slaves as its total picture of slavery during this period? In an article in the Washington Post, the film-makers have said that slavery and racism were simply "too raw" an emotional issue to present in their film. In other words, who would want to see a love story with the beautiful Jude Law and Nicole Kidman set in the reality of the Southern monstrosity of slavery? The film opens with a depiction of one of the more important battles of the Civil War, one in which the Union-trained black soldiers tunnel under Confederate lines -- a battle in which blacks suffered their highest rate of casualties of any Union division in the fight. Yet, it is almost impossible to spot any black actors fighting in this film (as three University of Virginia history professors recently noted in another Post article). It plays like "Saving Private Ryan," another Hollywood epic in which black contributions to history -- namely the Battle of Normandy -- are left out. Shame on you, Hollywood. The Weinstein brothers (owners of Miramax, the distributors of "Cold Mountain") are smart, astute businessmen with keen cinematic sensibilities. They should know better. Could you imagine "The Pianist" or "Schindler's List" ever being made with but a few seconds of the reality of the Holocaust? Of course not. A film with such a gross misrepresentation would never make it past page one of a screenplay! And in reality, isn't the Holocaust, which occurred a mere two generations or so ago, emotionally "rawer" than slavery?

source: http://hnn.us/roundup/12.html#2900

revised 1/10/04 by Schoenherr | Films