Abstract
FILM REVIEW Minghella's Mountain David Heddendorf IN CHARLES FRAZIER'S 1997 NOVEL COLD MOUNTAIN, the transplanted Charleston belle Ada Monroe ponders the wording of a letter she is writing to Inman, the Confederate soldier she awaits. At last she writes a single sentence, "Come back to me is my request," taking the line from "a ragged love song." The borrowed lyric signals her growth from "pose and irony" to "just saying what your heart felt, straight and simple and unguarded" (272). In the recent film version of Cold Mountain, written and directed by Anthony Minghella, Ada also writes "Come back to me" in a letter, but she is not recalling a song, or thinking about how best to express herself. The line occurs as part of an emphatic voiceover appeal: "If you are fighting, stop fighting. If you are marching, stop marching....Come back to me is my request." We hear the letter read aloud to the wounded Inman, who shortly afterward climbs from his hospital window and begins his long walk home. The revised handling of the letter is typical. Where Frazier the novelist slowly initiates characters into new outlooks on life, Minghella tightens his cinematic focus on a love story. By Frazier's own account in an article for Salon, Cold Mountain owed its original impulse not to the Civil War, and still less to the Ada-Inman romance, but to his fascination with "a very old way of life" in the Appalachian Mountains. Needing a "point of access" into this dimly recalled world, Frazier chose the war and the love story that Minghella recognized as the makings of an epic movie. Under Minghella's direction the readyfor -Hollywood themes become the heart of the picture, while the old way of life fades into the background. At first a reader might notice few differences in the film, aside from the usual screenplay tweaking: scenes shuffled, episodes conflated, lines of dialogue redistributed. The "goatwoman" Inman stumbles across in the woods is made into his rescuer in the film, after he and the preacher Veasey are shot by the Home Guard. Where Inman hunts down three Federal raiders who have terrorized a widowed mother, Minghella streamlines and softens the brutal episode. Such revisions have little effect on the overall story, while helping to squeeze Frazier's sprawling tale into a two-and-a-half-hour movie. 58 Other changes, however, say more about Minghella's artistic design. For instance, Inman carries a copy of William Bartram's Travels through both novel and film. While Frazier has Inman discover the book in a box of charitable donations, Minghella's Ada gives the Travels to Inman as a going-away present, thus staging their passionate farewell. Instead of consoling Inman with beloved landscape descriptions, the battered volume becomes his Ada-talisman and a hiding-place for his sweetheart's portrait. Frazier fans who see the film might miss a scene in which Ada and her friend Ruby encounter a great blue heron that approaches them, staring, before spreading its wings and taking flight. In lieu of this bird passage Minghella invents another. As Inman lies gurgling with his horrible throat wound, a dove fills the screen with translucent wings, heralding a dreamlike flashback in which Ada and Inman stand in an empty church. The dove, we discover, is trapped in the building. Nearly wordless, the couple exchange soulful looks as Inman tenderly captures the dove and releases it at the door. The haunting scene is almost impossible to imagine in Frazier's novel. For one thing, Frazier's Inman would more likely draw his fearsome LeMat's pistol and blast the bird out of the air. This reluctant soldier, as portrayed in the novel, canbe ruthless and cold-blooded. He doesn't just talk about how the war has ravaged his spirit—he routinely shoots and clubs men to death. Killing in self-defense or on behalf of others, he is nonetheless hard and remorseless, and speaks in harsh, sardonic accents. Genteel Ada, plenty prickly herself, meets her match in his proud, detached silences. Minghella sands the edges off these difficult characters, and converts them into warm, attractive people. As in...
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