The Essential Cold Mountain

FILM REVIEW The Essential Cold Mountain Thomas E. Douglass ANTHONY MINGHELLA'S COLD MOUNTAIN IS NOT Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, but then Frazier's Cold Mountain is not Cold Mountain either. Some 26 miles southwest ofAsheville at the highway turnout there on the Blue Ridge Parkway, you can get a good 14-milesaway peek at the real thing, some 6,030 feet above sea level. There's no town there, just a good chunk of Pisgah National Forest, and one trail leading up to the top. Cold Mountain sits north of the parkway, near Waynesville. Highway 276 runs roughly along the path of Wagon Gap Road and winds down from the north off the parkway and along the mountain's east side. Since Frazier's book (1997) and now Minghella's film (2003), the local real estate offices and the Forest Service have been flooded with calls for directions and a place to stay. One may ask: How deep is our yearning for the mythic return? And, in part, that was Frazier's vision of Cold Mountain when he wrote it, as an elegy to a lost past, a longing to recover the virtue of the land and its people. In a 1997 interview he said, "I think there's that old culture of America that's gone, and I suppose when I was a child in the Southern Appalachians, there was just a moment when you could see little, little vestiges of that, and part of the book is an elegy for that old America." And in essence, Inman's odyssey is fairly the same in both book and film—a Civil War veteran from western North Carolina, wounded at the battle of Petersburg, goes AWOL for the one he loves. "That is my request," Ada Monroe tells him. "Come back to me." And like Odysseus, braving the Trojan War, Inman, played by Jude Law in the film, braves the Civil War and all the temptations and corrupting influences ofwar, flesh, and the spirit to return to his Penelope, hisAda Monroe, played by Nicole Kidman. What's of interest here is not personality or star quality or how the film is like or unlike Frazier's book or Homer's Odyssey, but a sensitivity to the Appalachian quality of the film, that is, a sensitivity to what one thinks is essential or authentically represented. The soundtrack, in particular, produced and partly composed by T-Bone Burnett, inspires new interest in the Appalachian high lonesome sound. Burnett, who also produced the soundtrack for the Coen 54 Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), blends some old standards and newly composed tunes to provide the mountain music background. "Wayfaring Stranger" and "Great High Mountain" are among the traditional selections, and a new composition by Sting, "You Will Be My Ain True Love" sung by Alison Krauss, is haunting to hear. Moreover, the music helps narrate the film as in the church scene that depicts a congregation shape-note singing the Sacred Harp tune "I'm Going Home" while the news of war comes to them from the outside world. The musical prominence of the soundtrack also establishes the three mountain troubadours in the film story — the fiddle player Stobrod (Brendan Gleeson), the simple-minded banjo picker Pangle (Ethan Suplee), and the mandolin player Georgia (Jack White) who provide the culturally binding thread that helps unite the characters at the end. The film also draws on the many mountain folklorisms researched by Frazier (probably using the same class notes he was given in his folklore class at the University of North Carolina taught by Dan Patterson). Only a few, however, are used in the film — a bird flying in a house brings good luck; crows are heralds of death, and more importantly, one's future husband can be seen by holding a mirror over the left shoulder while looking inside a well. In fact, Minghella uses Ada's looking into the well as the organizing image of the film, the black and white and marble gray images of clouds and water and black crows and black silhouettes on a winter white landscape, most likely suggested by this passage from Frazier's...