Cold Mountain

The wife and I went to see Cold Mountain the civil war epic starring Jude Law, Renee Zellweger and Nicole Kidman. We saw it at the cheap seats, the Keller 8 cinema where a man and his sweetie can see a show and have popcorn and a soda for under 20 bucks.

The story encompasses a confederate soldier's desertion after being wounded. Jude Law plays W.P. Inman, who escapes from the hospital to head home rather than continue in pointless combat at the end of the war. Law's Inman has to dodge bands of Union raiders and Confederate troops on the lookout for deserters. Inman's flight is driven by a love for Kidman's Ada Monroe, a woman he barely knows. Excruciating drama is found as wanders from one brutal challenge after another. His journey is a historical travelogue of the depredations of war, and the toxicity of the "peculiar institution" that inspired the entire conflagration.

I am reflexively nervous about current movies of historical events. Hollywood has little respect for history as I term respect. They are quick to recast events and characters wildly out of their context, typically to score points to some modern sensibility, and I'm not a sufficient Civil War scholar to catch any but most incongruent mistake. Inman's journey is a bit fantastic, but serves to give the moviegoer a useful thumbnail of the aftermath of tens of thousands of men leaving their homes to fight.

I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. Protagonist and villain were portrayed deeper than the cardboard cutouts I've come to expect. Renee Zellweger is submerged into her character Ruby, who aids impractically instructed Ada, and lends a solid center around which Kidman's character is explored. As months become years, Ada has to grapple with her incompetence to run a farm and longing for the far away Inman. Ada and Ruby become intimate without becoming sexual, a forbearance I appreciate but am not used to, from a Hollywood movie.

The movie is beautifully shot and well-scored. One test of a movie for me is how engrossing the narrative is, and in spite of several overlapping plot elements, they all are tied together believably. Director Anthony Minghella is to be commended, since the average director hopelessly muddles these things.

Jim asked if I thought the movie glorified desertion. That's a question I don't have much of an answer for. Southern men of good will must have struggled mightily. A state has a constitutional right to find its own way, but to use that right to shield slavery… if ever there was a cause not worth dying for, that would be it.

I wonder if I might be compelled to abandon my comrades and just go home in such a situation. I don't know of any abolitionists who were pressed into service for the South, but surely there were some. In any case, I'll never know, and the fact that I'm thinking about is the mark of a good movie.

Tim McNabb