Although he's never going to be mistaken for a great visual stylist, Anthony Minghella has made his most formally coherent film yet in Cold Mountain. In past films, such as The English Patient and, to a lesser extent, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Minghella has been content to simply photograph a story without making full and expressive use of mise-en-scene. On the basis of Cold Mountain, however, he is showing signs that he is developing as a filmmaker. Directing his own adaptation of Charles Frazier's National Book Award-winning Civil War romance, Minghella communicates his characters' isolation and eventual separation from one another through careful framing and cutting patterns. He isn't exactly Vincente Minnelli yet, but he's moving in the right direction.

Ada (Nicole Kidman) and Inman (Jude Law) barely know each other before he is sent off to fight for the Confederacy, but their infatuation with each other appears to be practically instantaneous. The first time we see them together, Inman is working on the roof of a new chapel being built for Ada's father (Donald Sutherland), a minister, in the town of Cold Mountain. He sees Ada--whom he has never met--down below and we see her from his perspective. When she coaxes him down to offer him and his coworkers some drinks, Minghella refuses to give us a two-shot which would unite the characters. This is because the
two, however strong their initial attraction to one another, have hardly even spoken. So instead of a two-shot, Ada is seen in over-the-shoulder shots from Inman's perspective and vice versa.

It isn't until several scenes later that Ada and Inman share the same visual space. Inman, in profile, is plowing the field of their friend Sally (Kathy Baker) in the foreground of the shot. Ada and her father are riding in their wagon on a road in the background. Both Inman and Ada/Ada's father are both moving from right to left across the screen. Seeing Inman, Ada begins to play the piano, which is being hauled on the back of their large wagon. Minghella tracks along with Inman, with Ada's wagon and her piano playing creeping up "alongside" him in the distance. It's such a beautifully realized moment because Minghella has held out so long in presenting the characters within a single frame.

The shot is repeated, in essence, during the extraordinary moment when it is announced that war, at long last, has broken out with the North. Ada and Inman, somewhat more acquainted with each other by now, are singing in her father's chapel along with the rest of the congregation. Minghella pans across a series of pews until the shot is as such that Ada is in profile in the foreground on the left hand side of the shot and Inman is in the background looking straight ahead. After several quiet moments, we begin to hear yelling and commotion outside. It quickly becomes clear what the news is. As in the sequence described above with the wagon and the piano, the characters are united in space, but here it is during the very moment when we learn that they will be separated for months or years to come.

Cold Mountain's battle scenes recall the legendary Battle of Shrewsbury in Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight, a comparison I do not make lightly as I consider Chimes one of the three or four greatest films ever made and the Battle of Shrewsbury unquestionably the finest depiction of warfare ever put on screen. The scenes resemble each other to the extent that they start off as geometrically coherent (one side approaching from screen left; the other from screen right) but soon collapse into chaos. Specific images are recalled from Welles' film: heads buried in mud, hand to hand combat, and so on.

As Jonathan Rosenbaum has noted, Minghella's film places a particular and commendable emphasis on the costs of war, not only to those who serve but to those left behind. It is never portrayed glamorously. After the chapel scene discussed above, Ada and Inman step outside into the celebratory atmosphere following the announcement of war with the Union. Ada says dryly to Inman, "You have your war," and walks past him. As she does so, the camera follows her into her own universe of suffering and leaves Inman out of frame. (Indeed, so much of this film is seen from Ada's point-of-view--and Minghella is so attentive to her feelings and her sorrows--that I was amazed to see Law billed above Kidman during the final credit roll.) Minghella ends the scene with close-ups of Inman and Ada, looking anguished as they imagine what lays ahead for them, as hip-hip-horays boom on the soundtrack.

It's a pleasure to watch a film which could so easily fall into the "Tradition of Quality" category denigrated by the early French auteurists, but which instead boasts a fine sense of formal rigor and an admirable sense of morals in this time of war.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002