Cold Mountain

Charles Frazier’s novel, Cold Mountain, was a publishing sensation when it first appeared in 1997. For the better part of two years it seemed to be wherever you turned. It was the kind of book people gave to one another as a gift. Cold Mountain was that rarest of birds — a novel with unabashedly literary ambitions that was able to cross over and entertain a mass audience.

It was Charles Frazier’s first published work and, in it, he managed to combine some of the oldest and most reliable elements of the storyteller’s trade. There was mythic history, in this case drawing on America’s most primal rite of passage, the Civil War. Against this antique backdrop, Frazier described the odyssey of a solitary man called Inman who would endure a series of trials as he traversed a harrowing landscape on his way back to Ada, the woman who would be the love of Inman’s life.

But what really made Cold Mountain stand out from other novels of its class was Frazier’s prose, a writing that was formally elegant yet vividly cinematic. His violent episodes, in particular, were rendered with a stark brutality that approached the dreamlike intensity of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.

Were he still alive, Leone, with his operatic flair for grasping the emotional jugular, would have been an inspired choice to direct the adaptation of Frazier’s book. Instead, we get Anthony Minghella’s version. It is remarkably faithful to its source in many ways, but somehow manages to miss the passion at its core.

Minghella, who has previously covered such books as The English Patient and The Talented Mister Ripley, directs as though he’s explicating for a graduate English seminar. He manages to block Frazier’s double-barreled narrative involving Inman’s journey and Ada’s life on the farm into an effective call-and-response rhythm. He also seeds this flow with a remarkable number of well-drawn vignettes that are, by turns, moving and wrenching.

What’s more, Minghella gets fine performances from all three leads: the cat-eyed Nicole Kidman, Rene Zellweger and Jude Law. Law continues to be a revelation. This is the second time he’s played a man of action (the first being his Russian sniper in Enemy at the Gates). He possesses all of Steve McQueen’s legendary stillness, but without the anti-intellectualism.

All of these elements make a fine map of Frazier’s book, but they somehow miss the landscape of the heart that made Cold Mountain such a powerful read. Minghella gets the war story — the unrelenting horror of a toxic society turned in upon itself. But Inman and Ada’s love story, without the interior language Frazier had at his disposal to animate it, seems slight in comparison. When, finally, they find each other on a snow-covered mountain trail it ought to be heart-stopping. Sergio Leone would have paused to show us how even a moment can be eternal. For Anthony Minghella, this encounter is only a breather before the killing yet to come.