![]() Minghella has altered and in some instances improved on the novel’s episodes, sharpening the emotional connection between the long-separated lovers and underscoring the perils of a land robbed of its manners and morals by war. ![]() Meanwhile, Ada and Ruby must fend off the local Home Guard, led by a treacherous Teague (Ray Winstone) and his blond-tressed henchman Bosie (Charlie Hunnam), and deal with the surprise homecoming of Ruby’s wayward, fiddle-playing father (Brendan Gleeson), long thought dead but returned as a deserter along with two fellow musicians (Jack White and Ethan Suplee). In his travels, he encounters a randy and disgraced minister (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a backwoods redneck (Giovanni Ribisi) lording over a family of sluts, a frightened young widow (Natalie Portman) at the mercy of federal raiders and a guardian angel disguised as a goat keeper (Eileen Atkins). Inman sticks to back roads as the Home Guard roams the countryside looking for deserters to shoot. A kind neighbor (Kathy Baker) sends to her aid a tenacious local woman named Ruby (Zellweger), who may be uneducated but is tougher than most men and know every trick to running a homestead. But his sudden death leaves his daughter, schooled in music and French, overwhelmed by a farm she does not know how to tend. Ada’s minister-father (Donald Sutherland) brought her to Cold Mountain, where he wanted to preach. Inman met Ada (Kidman) just before war broke out, so their memories of each other are few but all the more precious for their brevity. Both the book and movie cut between the episodic tales of the soldier’s survival and the struggles of the woman he left behind. Frazier drew upon stories handed down by his North Carolina ancestors to recount the journey of Inman (Law), who walks out of an army hospital for a journey through mountains and forests rife with danger. ![]() In his novel, Frazier transposed Homer’s The Odyssey into the waning days of the Civil War, where a wounded Confederate soldier searches for his home. While Jude Law is at times cool and remote, he makes you feel a soldier’s war weariness and his determination to walk home from the battlefield. Renee Zellweger completely disappears into the person of the feisty farm girl who rescues Kidman’s helpless gentlewoman farmer. Nicole Kidman is allowed to look entirely too glamorous for the period and her character’s dire situation, but she does capture the yearning and hopes of a young woman waiting for her soldier to return from an increasingly senseless war. Macho pride is viewed as lethal folly, leading to unimaginable hardship and tragedy that will take generations to heal.Ī solid cast plays the backwoods Southerners extremely well. And as he did with The English Patient, Minghella has made a war movie that is likely to intrigue women more than men. Today, Asheville is just a short scenic drive from the real Cold Mountain and many other places you can go to walk in the footsteps of Inman and Ada.Writer-director Anthony Minghella has meticulously crafted an intimate epic that, while it does have a somewhat cerebral tone, is clearly determined to translate Frazier’s vision of human hope amid great brutality to the screen. During the Civil War era, the Land of Sky, as Asheville was once known, was just beginning to transform itself from a thriving hub for livestock drovers to the sophisticated resort that it would soon become. "That's the place I know the best, and the place that in my imagination sums up all those things about being rooted and knowing a place and having a place."ĭespite the international success of the book and movie "Cold Mountain," few people realize that Cold Mountain is a real place that looms well above the horizon southwest of Asheville, an eclectic town nestled in the Western North Carolina mountains. "Whenever I'm back in those mountains, I feel like that's home, no matter how long I've been away," says Frazier, whose family has lived in the hills of North Carolina for over 200 years. "Cold Mountain" tells the dramatic story of a wounded Confederate soldier named Inman (played by Jude Law) who leaves his hospital bed in Raleigh, North Carolina, to make a perilous trek back to his beloved home near Cold Mountain in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina and the sweetheart he left behind (played by Oscar-winner Nicole Kidman).Īuthor Charles Frazier found inspiration for what he calls his "American odyssey" in the mountainous backwoods near Asheville and in the area's local history and unique culture. Find out how to plan a daytrip to Cold Mountain. Based on Asheville-area native Charles Frazier’s best-selling Civil War-era novel "Cold Mountain," you can visit the real Cold Mountain in the mountains of Western North Carolina.
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