Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain: Lover, Come Back - Page 3

The pairing of Ruby and Ada in the long central section is like the pairing of resourceful, defiant Scarlett and sweet, passive Melanie in Gone With the Wind (1939)--a movie the scope of which makes Cold Mountain seem like a postage stamp expanded to the size of a billboard. But Cold Mountain also makes a very old-Hollywood choice in focusing on wan, refined Ada instead of fearless, spunky Ruby. It's too long a movie to ask us to identify with the girl who shrieks at the approach of a symbolically aggressive rooster rather than with the gal who knows a meal when she sees one and promptly rips the cock's head off. I also wonder if Minghella is aware of the black-widow shadow the tragic outcome casts over the supposedly idyllic ending. Ada enjoys Inman once before his death, and for all we see once is enough, to last a lifetime, now that she has a (female) child and knows how to skin a lamb.

Without period accuracy the movie can't really have historical depth, and for all the movieishness it plays out as a peculiarly muted version of the simplest of quests: homecoming (from the Odyssey, Xenophon's Anabasis, and the Book of Exodus to The Wizard of Oz (1939)). The air of tragedy just makes you want to fast forward to the no-good you know is coming. To keep things violent enough for the men in the audience, two sections of Home Guard and a passel of Union soldiers come on by turns for some melodramatic attacks, which only have the effect of making all the likeable characters into victims. The movie might as well be projected on a wet blanket.

There is a superb battle sequence at the beginning, which opens with an explosion of mines under the Southern encampment at Petersburg. We see one soldier puzzling as the ground slowly lifts upward beneath him and you feel that the moviemakers have really got how disorienting a surprise attack must be. The ensuing hand-to-hand combat is the muddle that many battles must have turned into before modern weaponry, but I don't see how this makes the movie anti-war. What makes it anti-war is that the hero is fighting for the Confederacy and the movie was made for an audience that is not expected to root for the Southern cause. In other words, it's anti-war only from the Southern perspective.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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