![]() And so, he runs into the Reverend Veasey (Philip Seymour Hoffman), whom he stops from murdering the black woman pregnant with his child (she’s unconscious at the time) an opportunistic backwoodsman (Giovanni Ribisi) a miserable widow (Natalie Portman), whose baby he saves from brutal, desperate Union soldiers and the wise old goat-tender Maddy (Eileen Atkins), who bestows on him helpful principles. Adapted by Anthony Minghella from Charles Frazier’s 1997 novel, the movie takes up an episodic structure, such that Inman’s journey home - he deserts, following his own near fatal injury, a shot to the neck - leads him from one distressing encounter to another, Odyssey-style. If the movie makes one point clearly and repeatedly, it’s that war is a terrible unmaking - of men as much as boys, of community as much as nation.Īnd yet: following the model of Saving Private Ryan, in which an opening scene of utter mayhem is then recuperated by a lengthy romantic narrative, Cold Mountain proceeds to lay out bits of logic and moral order. Of course he’s not, but then, no one could be. As this moment evinces awareness of stakes for the nonwhite characters, it also dismisses them.Īnother image is more specific to the film’s concerns: Inman struggles mightily to save a pale slip of a Johnny Reb (Lucas Black) whom he recognizes from back home in Cold Mountain, North Carolina: “You’re Mo Oakley’s boy,” he calls out, just before the detonation literally rends the ground beneath them, then wonders aloud if he’s “old enough” to be here. That this is one of the film’s few references to the raced history and politics of the Civil War and its era (aside from Ada’s efforts to bring drinks on a tray to offscreen, unseen “Negroes”) is not a little troubling. One such concerns Inman’s comrade, a Native American, exchanging a look with a black man fighting for the North. The tumult of flying body parts, thickening smoke, and reddening mud offers few instances where viewers might feel anything but confusion. The film’s version of this crater-bound carnage is impressively alarming. “Like shooting fish in a barrel!” cries out one of Inman’s fellows, as they rush forward to kill as many opponents as possible in a frenzy of hand-to-hand combat. The result is pandemonium: the Yankees’ leadership is inept (drunk and slow to react), and the Southern soldiers find their enemies trapped in the gaping hole they have blown open. And then, “Burnside’s mine,” a 586-foot tunnel dug and rigged with explosives for weeks under the Southern camp, explodes. Neither the hunkered down Southern troops nor the advancing Northerners can anticipate the coming devastation (says one self-assured Southerner, “Them Yankee boys keep store hours”). It’s July 1864, and the Siege of Petersburg, Virginia is underway (it lasted from June 1864 to April 1865). As the camera reveals a company of filthy-faced, exhausted Confederate soldiers, Ada (Nicole Kidman) reads her letter to long-absent love Inman (Jude Law): “This awful war,” her voiceover lilts, imagining their eventual reunion, “will have changed us both beyond all reckoning.” Today, Asheville is just a short scenic drive from the real Cold Mountain and many other places you can go to walk in the footsteps of Inman and Ada.The first scene in Cold Mountain is sensational and sickening, an apt introduction to a Civil War saga. ![]() During the Civil War era, the Land of Sky, as Asheville was once known, was just beginning to transform itself from a thriving hub for livestock drovers to the sophisticated resort that it would soon become. ![]() "That's the place I know the best, and the place that in my imagination sums up all those things about being rooted and knowing a place and having a place."ĭespite the international success of the book and movie "Cold Mountain," few people realize that Cold Mountain is a real place that looms well above the horizon southwest of Asheville, an eclectic town nestled in the Western North Carolina mountains. "Whenever I'm back in those mountains, I feel like that's home, no matter how long I've been away," says Frazier, whose family has lived in the hills of North Carolina for over 200 years. "Cold Mountain" tells the dramatic story of a wounded Confederate soldier named Inman (played by Jude Law) who leaves his hospital bed in Raleigh, North Carolina, to make a perilous trek back to his beloved home near Cold Mountain in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina and the sweetheart he left behind (played by Oscar-winner Nicole Kidman).Īuthor Charles Frazier found inspiration for what he calls his "American odyssey" in the mountainous backwoods near Asheville and in the area's local history and unique culture. Find out how to plan a daytrip to Cold Mountain. ![]() Based on Asheville-area native Charles Frazier’s best-selling Civil War-era novel "Cold Mountain," you can visit the real Cold Mountain in the mountains of Western North Carolina. ![]()
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