![]() This slow motion bird fluttering is supposed to be tremendously symbolic (as with John Woo films) but I found it a bit annoying. There is a scene of a white pigeon that gets stuck in the church and which Inman releases. In the book, it is Inman who first approaches Ada, and only well after the church is built. Inman’s help on the project was only briefly mentioned in the book, but the film shows it and even has Ada serve him cider at one point while he’s working. The film emphasizes Ada’s father coming to town just as the church he is to preach in is being built. There were several liberties taken with the novel here, but most seem to be in keeping with the tone of the book. The film then flashes back to before the war and shows us the love relationship between Inman and his love. Hollywood could never get their jaws around that, however. In the book, the letters are written but never physically received. Inman then receives a message to come home from Ada, the woman he had barely fallen in love with before marching off to war. It’s good to set up the importance of the music, and the soundtrack really works well throughout. The book has him fiddling to a dying girl much later on and in a separate context, but this is a good example of compressing the storyline into the script. ![]() The fiddler, Stobrod Thewes, comes to play an important part later in the film. Several of the locals from Cold Mountain also die in this battle and one, a young boy, requests a fiddle tune to remind him of his hometown and a young girl’s love. In this scene, we watch young Inman receive the vicious neck wound that sends him to a hospital, nearly killing him. On April 2, 1865, nine-and-one-half months after the siege began, Lee evacuated Petersburg. Lee’s supply lines into Petersburg and Richmond. Grant settled in to subdue the Confederacy by surrounding Petersburg and cutting off General Robert E. Grant failed to capture Richmond in the spring of 1864. *Petersburg, Virginia, became the setting for the longest siege in American history when General Ulysses S. If you’re a Civil War buff or just want to see a good love story, put Cold Mountain at the top of your list.Īlthough the novel doesn’t even mention the opening scene of the film until much later, and then much more briefly (pages 123-124), Minghella picked it to exemplify the Hell that the main character, Inman, had been going through during the war. It’s a fascinating period in our nation’s history. My next big writing project, Thieves Road is going to follow closely in the tradition of both Cold Mountain & The Outlaw Josey Wales. And, although Wales is from Missouri, he comes from the same “hill people” stock as Inman, and has a similar stoicism about him. Both are hardworking farmers who never owned a slave in their life. In Cold Mountain, Inman was a killing machine from the earliest years of the war, then finds hope and his lost humanity by leaving the war to search for the love he left behind. Josey Wales loses hope when his love is killed, and he then turns into a killing machine after having successfully avoided the war for so long. To me, Cold Mountain can be seen as sort of a companion piece to The Outlaw Josey Wales. I’ve been a fan of the Civil War genre for a long time. The rest of the supporting cast is also superb, including Philip Seymour Hoffman as Reverend Veasey, Natalie Portman as Sara, and Giovanni Ribisi as Junior. Renée Zellweger gets a chance to break out of the glamorous niche she carved for herself in Chicago by playing the wily and indomitable Ruby. Jude Law is one of our generation’s best actors and makes a great Inman. ![]() I was a bit uncertain when I heard that one of the best novels about the American Civil War was going to be adapted to film with an English leading man and an Australian beauty against the Romanian countryside. This film is actually an adaptation of an adaptation! I’m sure that Frazier doesn’t begrudge a few changes to his story, since, after all, he made a liberal adaptation of the original family stories handed down to him by his father. I am a huge fan of the novel by Charles Frazier and the film does a good job of keeping the epic scope of the novel intact, although it does compact the plot and combine characters and stories along the way. The cinematography, pacing, and editing are all great in this film. He’s partial to sweeping romances, but he’s a wonderful director. If you’ve seen The English Patient, you’ve a good idea of the type of material and the style which Minghella is known for. Based on the novel by Charles Frazier.Screenplay by Anthony Minghella. In the waning days of the American Civil War, a wounded soldier (Law) embarks on a perilous journey back home to Cold Mountain, North Carolina to reunite with his sweetheart (Kidman).
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