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This is a comparative critique of Charles Frazier's novel Cold Mountain and the film of the same name. I saw the film when it was first released and it was a gem of a movie. Recently I read Charles Frazier's novel and found the book to be significantly different from the film.
The basic outline of Frazier's story forms the core of the movie but the love story between Ada Monroe and Inman is very different in the novel. The magnetic attraction between the two drives the movie and provides the emotional tension that keeps the viewer alert, almost like a mystery plot. Will the two survive to meet and live happily ever after? Charles Frazier's novel does not use that tension to drive the story.
The first scene in the book is set in the Petersburg hospital and Inman's motivation to desert his regiment after years of loyal service is his disillusionment with the war. Ada Monroe does not enter his thoughts by name until he is well on his way home. The reader puts the two together when the author makes Ada the subject of the next chapter but she, too, is not consumed with longing for Inman. Rather, Ada is occupied with growing up and surviving after her father passes away. When Ruby Thewes enters her life midway through the chapter Ada's attention centers around her relationship with the capable and earthy young woman.
Well past halfway into the novel Inman finally reveals that when (and if) he meets Ada Monroe he will declare his intentions right away and, if he is rebuffed, he will turn back around and keep walking. For her part, Ada only thinks of Inman during quiet moments of solitude and is not sure he is still alive. Whether or not they will live happily ever after - or even meet again - is only inferred by the structure of the novel. Even if I hadn't seen the movie first I would have expected that conclusion but it is not uppermost in the minds of the characters.
Both the book and the movie, then, are beautiful depictions of the same story as if you had heard alternate versions of a story about a neighborhood couple from two trusted friends. The various vignettes that the film's fans know well are mostly all different from the book. The various Home Guards are not half the antagonists in the book as they are in the movie and Captain Teague has no back story, no motivation, in the novel.
Inman, Ada, Ruby, Stobrod and Reverend Monroe are all finely drawn characters and everybody else, including even Esco and Sally Swanger, are background figures. Inman's journey is not so much Homer's Odyssey in the book. Anthony Minghella used the Odyssey as a concept for the film before he wrote the screenplay, as he relates in the Extra Feature interview. The human interactions of the vignettes provide the constant motion that contemporary filmgoers expect but in the novel the geography, the weather, the wildlife, the food and Inman's solitude are all virtual characters in a way that would have ground the film to a halt.
The movie has all that exquisite cinematography and an excellent soundtrack written by Gabriel Yared. The period music is well researched under the experienced guidance of T-Bone Burnett. The extended version DVD includes the feature, "The Music of Cold Mountain", which I highly recommend. One surprise for me was the writer of the song, "My Ain True Love" - Sting. The mysticism of Ada's vision from Sally's well is an invention of screenwriter Anthony Minghella. That minor sub-plot serves to create a subtle tension and a gentle resolution at film's end but Charles Frazier did not intend Ada's vision in the well to be a plot device.
To me, Jude Law fit Charles Frazier's portrait of Inman very nicely and Renée Zellweger was a perfect Ruby Thewes. Every other face fit nicely into Frazier's characters except Nicole Kidman. She was fine in the movie but I do not think Kidman would have been Frazier's pick had he been given the choice, not the way he drew Ada Monroe in the novel. Read the book and see if I'm right. Who would you have rather seen as Ada Monroe?
*Update for Civil War buffs:
Inman was probably a member of the 49th North Carolina Infantry. Charles Frazier does not identify Inman's regiment in the novel but the 49th was everywhere Inman was, including the first regiment north of the South Carolina brigade that was the victim of the Petersburg Mine explosion. They were also in the thick of the fighting at the Battle of Weldon Railroad later where Inman received his neck wound in the book, as opposed to the movie where he was wounded in a night skirmish a few days after the Battle of the Crater.
Then there is a problematic scene in the movie after Inman deserts. He is seen walking on a beach with his right shoulder towards the water - walking north, but that's not the real error. For a Confederate deserter to leave Petersburg from the hospital he would have had to go west toward the Danville Road then turn south. Access to the Virginia coastline was controlled by Yankee troops in 1864. In the book Frazier never traces Inman's route on a map but he never wrote a scene involving an ocean. An appendix in the novel mentions the reference book North Carolina Troops in the Civil War as well as Charles Frazier's extensive hikes in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwestern Virginia and North Carolina so any historical inconsistencies are a fault of the film, not the novel.
Is the story an anti-war parable? I do not think the novel is anti-war so much as it is historically accurate. After Sherman captured Atlanta and siege warfare settled on the Army of Northern Virginia the fate of the south was sealed. Many North Carolina soldiers deserted in the winter of 1864-65 so Inman's decision would not have been unique. This is just the first fictional story to give voice to those deserters as opposed to the ill-fated men who fought on to Appomattox and had their stories pass into legend. And Inman was still a formidable warrior on his journey, several times engaging adversaries that outnumbered and outgunned him but still he came away victorious. Frazier's story and Minghella's film tell a mostly overlooked tale about the people of a conquered nation and how they dealt with the lives they were forced to live. That is not anti-war, just reality as it was in 1864.
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