British director Anthony Minghella has had notable successes at adapting famous novels to the screen, particularly his Oscar-winning The English Patient. Which is probably why he was commissioned to adapt and direct Charles Frazier’s best-seller Cold Mountain. This time round, though, Minghella fails to make it work.
His adaptation of The English Patient was a marvel. Michael Ondaatje’s novel is deeply non-chronological and overwhelmingly poetic. Minghella managed to fillet from Ondaatjie’s linguistic efflorescences a coherent storyline, and moreover to turn it into something of an epic (huge landscape shots and so on), yet one with an intimate emotional core.
That, one presumes, is what was wanted for the movie of Cold Mountain. Frazier’s novel is not as self-consciously in love with language as Ondaatje’s, but it has its own sinewy, down-home style that achieves a kind of earthy poetry in places. And Minghella would not have had to re-order the storyline, in that the novel itself neatly alternates chapters between the American Civil War soldier on his way back from the front and the life of the woman he left behind. It also has an epic frame: the Civil War itself, the course of which parallels the novel’s tale.
So the ingredients are there. Why doesn’t it work? Why is Cold Mountain so ponderous, so lacking in rhythm? Why do its epic elements feel merely grandiose, while its intimate parts seem underdeveloped? It is hard to tell.
Nicole Kidman plays Ada, just arrived in the small town of Cold Mountain with her preacher father (Donald Sutherland). Among those building the new church is the allegedly taciturn WP Inman (Jude Law), though he seems to speak well and often enough. The complexities and subtleties of their growing affection for one another, which the novel can present at a leisurely pace and with more inwardness, are summarised in the film with a few short scenes, a little awkward dialogue, and a sudden smooch.
Then Inman is off to war. He is wounded, sent to hospital, and eventually decides to desert and make his way, by foot, back to Ada. He undergoes a series of Odyssean and sometimes odd adventures en route. She, meanwhile, is looking after the farm, along with another woman (Renée Zellweger) who turns up out of nowhere and, doing a lot of shouting in a very Deep South white trash accent, starts whipping the farm (and Ada) into shape.
At the same time, there are the depredations of local villain Teague (Ray Winstone) to worry about. He is ”the law” in the absence of the men who have gone off to fight, except he has ulterior motives. His villainy is made clear in a scene of gratuitous brutality; well, I suppose it’s not gratuitous if it’s there to tell us how wicked he is, but that’s all it appears to be doing.
The period seems well-recreated, except there’s barely a mention of slaves, a big Civil War issue. Perhaps there was a concern that we’d lose some sympathy for the characters if their slaves were actually visible. Kidman generally looks much too nice and clean, even when destitute, and everyone has perfect 21st-century teeth. The landscape (Rumania standing in for the United States) is asked to do a lot of work, which is perhaps Minghella’s substitute for Frazier’s prose, in the same way the beautiful, sandy wastes of the desert stood in for Ondaatje’s prose-poetry in The English Patient.
And yet what a plod Cold Mountain is — for us as well as Inman. By the time he gets back to Ada, you feel like you’ve trudged every step alongside him. For that to work, and for the audience to feel that all the suffering Inman and Ada (and we) have undergone so far was worth it, the destination has to be at least as important as the journey. And it just isn’t.
Here I’m going to give plot details away, so those who hate ”spoilers” should stop reading. The point is that Ada and Inman’s eventual reunion simply doesn’t provide a narrative (which is to say emotionally satisfying) justification for the pain we’ve been put through. A glowing sex scene by the fireside is not remotely enough. Nor is what follows.
After the long-delayed billing and cooing, there’s another burst of tragedy, and the audience is expected to have a quick sob before the uplifting postscript. That postscript is supposed to make all the foregoing suffering seem worth it, but in fact cancels it out with a paltry, emotionally dishonest gesture. It falls prey to the most obvious fake consolation Hollywood can offer: Inman is dead, but Ada has borne his child. So that’s okay then. Please note that Pearl Harbor, which we all agree was a piece of expensive rubbish, used the same ploy.
Dreary. That’s the word. Cold Mountain is big and good-looking and Law is excellent; Kidman is reasonably good and Zellweger is an enjoyable caricature. But it’s dreary.