Cold Mountain
dir. Anthony Mingella
Miramax Films

One of the most enchanting covers of any recent book belongs to Charles Frazier's National Book Award-winning novel "Cold Mountain." The cover by John Gall, adapted from a National Geographic photograph by James P. Blair, depicts the layers of Cold Mountain itself, from its periwinkle summit to the pitch-black forest below — a poetic rendering of the internal lives of the characters that live at its foot and, by extension, the total effect of the Civil War on the American soul.

Similarly, the strongest aspect of Frazier's writing is his physical descriptions of Cold Mountain, usually from the perspective of a porch near its base. He turns Cold Mountain into a metaphysical terrain that acts a sort of chorus, narrating the lives of his characters:

Ada wondered where she might find the courage to search out hope. When she emerged from the big trees of the ridge, she found that the haze had burned or blown away. The sky was clear, and Cold Mountain suddenly looked close enough to reach out and touch.

In this, as Newsweek praised it, Frazier's novel "attains the status of literature."

Why, then, do so many who begin reading "Cold Mountain" never finish it? Presumably in the effort to punch up the profundity of the prose, Frazier grinds the novel to a halt with his sonorous overwriting of internal dialogue. It's the sort of first-novel local-history writing more concerned with "attaining the status of literature" than with telling a story. Over the past decade, critics have crusaded to establish a boundary between pop culture (Oprah books and the popular cinema) and Literature!; — a noble goal, but one that hasn't resulted in better books, just more vague, muted and pretentious prose. An example from the first page of Frazier's novel:

Inman would have read to pass the time until breakfast, for the book he was reading had the effect of settling his mind.

Rather than just saying "for the book settled his mind," Frazier buries this simple thought in extraneous words. Over the course of 400 pages, this overstuffed prose fatigues and confuses the reader. Frazier's third chapter is titled "Verbs, all of them tiring." No, Chuck — verbs aren't tiring. But unnecessary dependent clauses that artificially inject serious-mindedness by using indefinite and relative pronouns? Exhausting.

The thing their pattern of flying told was more rain.

What Ada came to understand was that though she might be greatly concerned at their lack of cash, Ruby's opinion was that they were about as well off without it.

Part of Ada's reasoning in choosing the piano for barter was that there would be little room for art in her coming life and what place she had for it could be occupied by drawing.

What was required to speak that language was a picture held in the mind of the land one occupied.

Frazier's pseudo-profound prose requires the reader to reread certain sentences — often important sentences intended to have real meaning. This kills the rhythm of the writing. It isn't "challenging the reader;" it's a lack of clarity. Skilled authors challenge the reader to decipher the layers of meaning in image and metaphor, as a close reading of that cover might, not to translate the prose into understandable English. Consider this sentence from near the climax of the novel:

What he wanted Ada to know was that you could tell such things on and on and yet no more get to the full truth of the war than you could get to the full truth of an old sow bear's life by following her sign through the woods.

It might take a couple readings just to figure out what's being said — not about the psychology of the characters, the social context or something metaphysical, but literally, what the hell is he saying? "Cold Mountain" is billed as an American "Odyssey," with the disillusioned Confederate soldier Inman (yes, that's really his name) the Odysseus searching for his Penelope (Ada) at the base of his Ithaca. Homer's myth began as an oral history and has been passed to us as a epic poem; Frazier's novel too is an epic poem, but he buries his poetry under heaps of prose, like the green grass of Cold Mountain underneath a foot of snow. What I want to say is that what it is about this book that is supposed to make it so great is what is actually very bad about what it is.

Consequently, the film adaptaion of "Cold Mountain" offers director Anthony Minghella the opportunity to unearth this great story — to extricate its natural poetry and place it stark on the screen, heightening its impact and deepening its meaning. But for all of Minghella's purported concern about being "faithful" to the novel, he never develops a cinematic voice — the film also lacks poetry. Minghella miscalculates, overdramatizing the relationship between Inman and Ada, lending it that vague, puffed-up feel of a big-screen epic. Minghella doesn't have the advantage of internal monologue, so he heaps too much responsibility on his actors and thus strains the abilities of his two leads.

In this way, Minghella is actually too "true" to the novel; he also overwrings this already elusive relationship. Epic poetry, whether on screen or page, is about the flow of ideas from intense feeling, but Minghella doesn't use the visual drama of the southern United States to advance the plot, characters or themes. He just does the visual equivalent of Frazier's "What he wanted Ada to know was that …" prose and shoves the camera at his actors without restraint, without developing the natural landscape into a psychological one that deepens the impact and meaning. Frazier occasionally succeeds in creating Literature!, and Minghella insists on honoring that shortcoming; the movie should have been about Cold Mountain, but instead, it's about "Cold Mountain."

Which is not to say that Minghella's Cold Mountain is entirely bare of achievement. The film opens with a violent re-creation of the Battle of Petersburg, in which the Union army discharged explosives underneath the Confederates, sending tons of dirt and bodies several yards in the air. The "Federals" charge, not knowing that they undermined the ground beneath them, resulting in a shooting gallery for the surviving Confederates. Inman (Jude Law), rather than fire into the pit, looks on with disgust, anger and sadness. The scene's violence — which, at its best, recalls the chaos of a Bosche painting — clues us into Inman's internalized nature more dramatically than does the book, which opens with that "effect of settling his mind" passage.

Better still, Minghella's Ada (Nicole Kidman) is introduced by a neighbor as "a real southern belle who would get any boy here to work my whole north field for me." Any boy except Inman, that is; he's relatively unmoved by the approach of this white-laced, parasol-spinning doll. Their courtship is brief and awkward, barely qualifying as courting at all — more like tentative flirtation until the stress of the war accelerates them into kissing because, well, that's what young beautiful people like Ada and Inman are supposed to do when the boys go to war. Yet there's something daring in the elusiveness of the relationship — the movie wants us to care about the relationship because it's all either of them have to hold onto, no matter how tenuous it was in practice. This is also the audience's stake in the relationship — we long for Inman and Ada's embrace as they long for it, too.

In truth, however, their relationship is undefinable, the only truth found not in explanation but description. The key to their relationship — whether it's empty hope, aggressive denial, simple placation of despair, faith in a savior or some commingling of these — lies in the landscape of the Civil War South, especially Cold Mountain. But Minghella is not ambitious enough to search out the poetry of their relationship across the south, like Homer on the seas, David Lean in the desert or John Ford in the west. Instead, he trusts star power, which takes us only so far. Law's brooding consists of tight lips and deep stares, but without Inman projecting much charisma or mystery, it's hard to grasp why Ada finds him attractive to begin with. As for Kidman, her flirty eyes transform into the hardened gaze of a laboring woman, but she's not given the tools to create a truly internalized performance. In The Hours, when Kidman's Virginia Woolf locks onto a dead sparrow, the servants cracking eggs, a blank page, the still creek waters or her stifling husband, we know exactly what she means. Here, Minghella doesn't direct the actor's gaze, so it's difficult to read exactly what, or if, she's thinking.

A great performance, like a painting, can embody pages of prose in a few images — a visual poetry necessary to distill the 15-hour reading of a book into two or three. Minghella gets great performances … but only in supporting roles, like those of Renée Zellweger and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and not from his leads. Everyone knows by now that the visual can be as rich as the verbal, offering a compelling interpretation for those familiar with the text or, thankfully, leaving it to the viewer to discern motivation — something most tell-not-show prose can't do. Still, the primary virtue of literature, as Truffaut once said, is that books are about what happens inside people, whereas film is about what happens between people, and so a story whose main character is named Inman is probably more suited to literature. A better approach to Cold Mountain would have been to dramatize the internal with external imagery — not just take it for granted that marquee names will carry the movie. Minghella's big-star approach is the Hollywood version of Frazier's Literature!-mindedness. What Minghella does with the movie he has made about the book that has been written about Cold Mountain is not what could have been done with what material he was given.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)