Cold Mountain 
2003
155 minutes
Rated R

reviewed by MC5, December 2005

MIM is torn by this movie, because its impact is uncertain. On the one hand, 
it's another movie rehashing the Confederacy in a country with an excessive 
preoccupation with the losers of the Civil War. On the other hand, we have to 
agree with the businessman behind the movie Harvey Weinstein: "every day, we 
read the cold statistics of war--the loss of soldiers from Britain, from the 
US, and in other conflicts around the world. We read about soldiers shot down 
in a helicopter. For most of us, it's just another name in a newspaper. But 
behind every one is a family who have suffered this devastating loss, and who 
are going to have to find the strength and courage to go on." That's exactly 
right about this movie, and thus it may be a rare movie with a progressive 
unintended consequence. We are giving it the benefit of the doubt for its 
possible pacifist impact.

The verdict still seems to be out on whether this movie is going to end up a 
Southern cult classic. The film locates the main characters and actions in the 
Confederate South. Still that does not mean the narrowness we might think. 
Proper lady Ada Monroe (played by Nicole Kidman) is no raving war lunatic. Her 
boyfriend is, but he straightens out somewhat in the presence of Ada Monroe's 
preacher father who remarkably stands neutral on the war at a time when young 
Southern men are hooting and hollering for it. In fact, about the only one who 
talks any real sense is the medical doctor surveying all the casualties and 
claiming the men are no longer itching to go fight for the "rich man's slaves."

The worst part of the movie is how it makes Blacks disappear. A Black womyn 
shows up as a total victim of a white preacher who wants to kill her rather than 
let her have his baby. The preacher says they'd both be better off with her 
dead. Being exactly the kind of preacher who opposes interaction with Blacks, 
the preacher ends up reminding us of those who preached segregation like Strom 
Thurmond while secretly fathering babies with Black mothers. In other words, we 
speak of people wedded to a white version of Christianity and its teachings on 
hypocrisy while nonetheless being hypocrites. In this case, it's far better to 
be a hypocrite than to be a murderer. MIM has no relation to that sort of 
Christianity, and instead we stand categorically for the rights of Black wimmin 
and mixed race children--without any need for any Ten Commandments.

Blacks also show up as secretive rural thieves moving in a pack. Otherwise, all 
focus in the movie is on whites. If it is true that Amerikkkans treat other 
nations poorly, because they regard their own lives with so little regard, then 
Weinstein will turn out right about this movie's impact. If the movie is a 
failure (and we do not have confidence without measuring this in more detail), 
it will be because of a lack of understanding in "Cold Mountain" of the forces 
moving history forward. With the background of the North winning the war 
inexorably, it may be difficult for viewers to translate that to any other 
context. If so, the movie's whiteness will end up dragging down its impact into 
negative territory. We are giving this movie limited approval, because its whiteness
may address just the audience that needs addressing for militarism.

Despite a focus on the South, "Cold Mountain" makes clear that the "Home League" 
or national guard of the South  brought death and destruction for a hopeless 
cause. We can use this movie to as a textbook lesson in what "reactionary" is. 
Here we have white southerners exerting tremendous reactionary violence on 
behalf of a cause with no future. Some of the worst violence in the film occurs 
a few days before the war is over. Desperate reactionaries kill and die just for 
an idea.

Yet the futility of the southern home leagues is only clear because of the 
inevitability of the North's victory in a war dragged on for four years. If it 
were not for the force demonstrated in war, the South would regard its national 
guard forces as more patriotic and involved in flushing out "deserters" who 
deserved their executions. Force decided the question --not a constant 
patriotism in favor of the local supposed defense groups' torturing wimmin and 
enlisting children to fight.

Renee Zellweger won an Oscar for playing a rough-and-ready, practical and 
independent feminist of the South showing up to save the day for Ada Monroe. MIM 
prefers to think that it was not so much Zellweger's acting as the pungent role 
she had to play.

Likewise, if we assume the question is not just the movie's limited sex scenes, 
we see why filmsinreview.com said "'Kidman and Law lack chemistry.'" Ada Monroe 
and her boyfriend come off as flat and simple. Yet just as we do not give Renee 
Zellweger the preponderance of the credit for her role unless she wrote it, we 
do not blame the director for the main characters' lack of perceived chemistry. 
We prefer to think that the point was that Ada Monroe despite her urban educated 
sensitivities was still simply old-fashioned and interested in a barely educated 
and very simple man of the Confederacy. From our point of view, what makes the 
movie all the more powerful in its anti-militarist message is that even though 
some of these people look on the outside as simple, inarticulate and even crude, 
they also have detailed lives to live. While Ada Monroe has to be counted as 
intelligentsia, all the plain folk who save her are not. Yet they still suffer 
as excruciatingly as intellectuals do. 

So this has to do with how MIM typically sees a movie as less the actors' 
talents and more the logic of given social situations. Amerikans prefer to 
believe that individual acting makes a movie. We see more of a role for 
directors and writers and only then the political consciousness of the actor in 
a given social context. In contrast, the San Francisco Examiner took the more 
usual approach to such issues: "'it's difficult to tell whether Minghella 
chronically miscasts these epics, or if his mediocre direction stifles the cast 
he ends up with.'" We're just not interested in that: we're interested in what 
the writers' goals were to begin with. We'd say the San Francisco Examiner took 
an individualist approach, whichever way it chose in regard to "Cold Mountain." 
The individualist approach misses the whole point, especially in a war of 
millions against millions, because there is a definite benefit in picking 
characters that are typical and thus realistic.

Intense and wrenching, "Cold Mountain" reminds us of the humyn face of war and 
serves as an antidote for the evening news, military recruiting ads and
militarist video games offering spectacular fun.

Note:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/cold_mountain/