Cold Mountain

Film Review I was reluctant at first to see Cold Mountain. The war in Iraq was getting hot and I was hearing about how it was a critique of American "Yankee" militarism. Geez. That's a brave and usual stance these days. It's not that the U.S. is beyond criticism, it's just that most such criticism is so stupid, especially if it is coming from Hollywood. Then I learned that Anthony Minghella, who had done The English Patient, was the director. I really enjoyed The English Patient and decided to give the new effort a whirl. I was not disappointed. It is a somewhat dark film, but not nearly as dark as it might have been. If you watch the cut scenes on the second disc, especially the one with Natalie Portman, you can see that there was a danger of the film falling into an unintended comic morbidity. As it is, the film is quite good, beautiful to look at, well cast and well acted. Rene Zellweger steals the show, with the best performance I have ever seen her do, and all of the best lines. Nicole Kidman, who has always been so easy to look at, finally lands in a film that does her justice; she can certainly act. Jude Law is very fine as the stolid Inman and the supporting cast is sharp as well. The film's stance towards war is a bit of "a pox on both your houses," but the measure and type of pox dealt out is different and revealing. The Yankees, from the beginning, are shown to be ruthless, cold, mechanical and overly confident that the rightness of their cause will justify any atrocity on their part. There are shades of the Abu Gharib issue here. But the worst criticism, I think, is on the South, who are naive in the extreme about the nature of the conflict they face, and what it is they are fighting for. The South did have a few things worth fighting for - protecting states right vs. Federal encroachment being one, but the main issue was undoubtedly slavery. Most of the men doing the fighting did not even own slaves and they allowed themselves to be led to slaughter by the weak Confederate leadership. By foolishly choosing to enter a war they could not win, the Confederates brought terrible hardship to the entire U.S., but particularly to the south. Recently in Iraq, we have seen the U.S. deaths in action pass the 1,000 mark. Every one of those is a tragedy but in historical terms the Iraq war remains (and I hope will stay) a tea party. Deaths in the U.S. Civil War were something like one half million. In a part of the country that was rural and agricultural, and with a fighting strength of just over 1/3 of the north, and nowhere near the industrial capacity, it was sheer foolishness to allow the conflict to take place. Entering and thereby losing the war meant that the social fabric of the south was rent apart, and we see this in the film, in Inman's Odysseus like journey home, and in the degeneration of the small town of Cold Mountain. I have not been able to learn too much about the author of the book, about his intentions for the story, but it seemed like a very Christian tale to me. Inman is a sort of Christian everyman, enduring hell and wondering all the time, why me? Why do I suffer so? And the midpoint of the film is his meeting with the old hermit woman in the woods. I have heard her described as a witch, which seems to me wildly inappropriate. "Bird eats a seed, shits a seed, the seed grows," she says. "Bird has a purpose, shit has a purpose, seed has a purpose." There's a lot of religion and philosophy in that little statement, and it isn't necessarily pagan. It makes me want to take a look at the Book of Job, in fact. And (spoiler warning) the purpose of Inman's survival does seem to have a bit to do with seeds. The old woman's kindess to Inman and her attitude towards her goats are worth pondering. Rene Zellweger has a good line too, when she says, referring to the disastrous war, "They complain that it's raining outside, but it's them that made it rain!" (paraphrase). A good deal of the suffering we face is God's only indirectly; we do it to ourselves and to one another but have a hard time recognizing this. Inman rejects the war, recognizing how it is hopeless and how it eats at him. He also rejects the nihilism that grips the South as it's people begin to realize the scope of the catastrophe. Inman remains true to what a reasonable Christian would recognize as a Christian code of behavior, even allowing for the Spartan nature of his "wedding" to Ada. Inman is no Pharisee. There aren't too many movies that I see twice in one week. Recommended.