Cold Mountain

Slept through most of the saturday and then recalled how one of my female co-worker yearned to see me in a new outfit. Although any activity that disturbs my sleep is quicky shot down, procrastinated or despised. However with this I couldnt afford to. I was single :)
Next day I was in my sunday best ready to take-on the world (of course donning my new clothes). Cleaning my car: Again I am forced to perform an activity half heartedly. I reach my friends and we instantly hustled ourselves into the Cinema hall.
I found Cold Mountain to be a chore to get through, frankly. Indeed, Initially I was too excited even though this happens to be zillionth movie being made on civil war and then quickly slumped back into my seat because it bored and frustrated me. However, the script picked up when Ruby was introduced. I expect Zellweger to steal the show but given how bland and sketchy Ada and Inman were...

The major problem with Cold Mountain is that I never really got to know its two central characters. I have no idea what their lives were before the story began and never cared about what happened to them during the course of it. The colorful supporting characters were more memorable than the two romantic leads were. Ada and Inman simply had no personalities. Inman endures; Ada is weak but must learn to endure. That about sums them up.

At least Ada's character had some kind of an arc. Inman remained a cipher. The script implies he has some code of honor. We first meet him playing (an early form of lacrosse?) with his Cherokee neighbors; he later rescues a slave girl from a man who is trying to kill her. These P.C. attributes just felt tacked on. Why does he do these things? Just so he doesn't seem as nasty as the other characters populating his world?

Inman and Ada's romance was contrived and, worse, unbelievable. Theirs is that oft-used Hollywood gimmick of "love at first sight." (I believe in attraction at first sight but true love can only come from knowing somebody.) They share a handful of scenes together in Act One, where they mostly speak banal dialogue to one another. They kiss just once before Inman literally runs off to war. They write each other a few letters thereafter (a war movie clich? most recently seen in Pearl Harbor) but their few uneventful encounters in Act One failed to sustain my interest in ever seeing them reunited.

Why do Ada and Inman love and need each other so badly? I never found that out. I didn't know who these characters were so I didn't care about them. Thus, I didn't care what happened to them. That's one of the most fundamental yet easily forgotten lessons of screenwriting but I've read more scripts and seen more films that failed because that wasn't achieved. (Pearl Harbor and Captain Corelli's Mandolin immediately spring to mind.)

I just watched The Vikings again the other night. I mostly enjoyed it but it's a perfect example of an epic Hollywood romance where the main characters fall in love simply because it's demanded of them. After all, how can the two most beautiful people in the film not be in love?! It's just a given because they're the leads and that's what they're supposed to do. Ada and Inman's relationship felt as arbitrary as Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh's did in that film.

There's a rather lame attempt near the story's climax to have Ada and Inman address this issue head-on... by talking about it. That just made me painfully aware that the writer also realized it was a problem. "Look, the show's almost over and this issue's been hanging overhead from the get-go so let's just see clear it up now, shall we?" It was an awkward scene that took me right out of the story. By this late in the tale, explaining something to me won't work. My mind's been made up by then and it's too late to win me over. That's what the previous 100 pages were supposed to have done.

The other main problem with this draft is with its choppy, episodic structure. Cold Mountain might work better as a TV miniseries. At least that way the story would have more time to germinate, allowing us to bond with each new set of supporting characters that Inman encounters and to better understand how these encounters change him during his journey home.

While the supporting characters Inman meets may be more colorful or memorable than he is, that doesn't make them any more developed or compelling. They're just "ten minute ideas." Every ten pages or so a sequence ends, that character's fate is sealed, and then Inman moves on to the next quirky acquaintance. Again, I need to know who these people are in order to care about what happens next. Natalie Portman's character, Sara, is perhaps the most engaging and sympathetic of those that Inman meets but she's also the most manipulative and her fate the most predictable. And remember she's only in it for ten pages.

On the other hand, I think this draft spent enough time – if not too much – following Ruby and Ada. Their sequences together just kept hammering home the same point: Ada is weak and uneducated in the ways of the world and she'll die unless she becomes more like Ruby. I understood that the minute these two opposites were thrust together yet the point continued to be made. If I want to see a film about a Southern belle who loses everything she holds dear during the Civil War and must then toughen up in order to survive, why shouldn't I watch Gone with the Wind instead?

There were some powerful sequences here and there. The aforementioned "goat for supper" scene may make a vegetarian out of me yet. A campfire scene between Teague and two supporting characters was effectively tense (albeit predictable), and an earlier scene showing the Home Guard attacking a Yankee sympathizer's home was both sad and gruesome. Again, Inman's encounter with Sara was poignant yet manipulative. Plus, his apparent attraction to Sara only undermines the entire premise the script hinges on, which is that he only desires Ada and will do whatever he must to return to her. If they're going to explore the possibility of temptation, I would've liked to see Ada face that test as well but it never happened in this draft.

Anthony Minghella did a fine job of capturing the dreariness and morbidity of life in the South during the Civil War, showing the grim requirements that the times demanded from people in order to survive. You'll also feel the cold, pointless, and unbiased hand of death, which leaves almost no character untouched here. This made Cold Mountain an incredibly dark tale that offered only a few glimmers of hope. While the highbrow crowd may connect with the story on an intellectual level, Cold Mountain often failed on the more important (and cinematic) level, which is to establish an emotional bond with the spectator. Overall, Cold Mountain left me, well, cold