Although the main love saga may feel frigid, the characters of Cold Mountain are so deeply rooted in Charles Frazier's Blue Ridge Mountain culture that the film could not chill the charm of this homeward-bound story.  After seeing Cold Mountain this holiday season, I found myself in my hometown facing the real Cold Mountain from an overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway.  When I first heard the film was going to be made, I was more anxious than excited, even though the book was excellent and the story centers around the area where I grew up.  Anticipating this film's arrival was a bit like waiting for a doctor to give me test results.  In the past, representations of Appalachian people in film have been in the Deliverance vein, depicting us as gawking, banjo-picking, barefoot, and intractable.  When I saw the film, I felt a mixture of relief and joy.  I am happy to report that Cold Mountain treats its characters as real people and their hardships with respect.

This epic Civil War drama, and Homeric Odyssey, is also very much a product of its setting.  In an isolated place where survival came hard for many years after the "frontier" had been tamed, Cold Mountain plays an important role in the story, although the film was made on location in Romania.  Despite the jagged, snow-capped mountains that appear from time to time, the film manages to accomplish a sense of place that is truer to the Blue Ridge than I had hoped.  Cold Mountain, the community just a few mountains over from my own home, stands at the center of the story as a catalyst for the main character, a point of contention for Teague and his men, and a home for both a new comer and a lonely mountain woman.  The mountains were a place where survival of the fittest became a reality.  Land came to mean everything to the settlers whose roots lay in Scotland and Ireland.  And if you managed to survive off the land, then you came to know it like a friend and that land became home.  When Ruby Thewes (Renee Zellweger) pouts near the film's end because she is afraid she will no longer be welcome on Ada's  farm, we see the pride she has because she managed to make the farm work.  She has survived.

The movie's survival was also hard fought.  The actors lived in the Romanian wilderness while filming and had some adventures of their own.  In the end, Nicole Kidman and Jude Law have a hard time bringing the love story to the screen.  Their characters are only together for a matter of moments until they are separated by the onset of war. Having the leads on screen rarely together is not a recipe for success in most films.  The director Anthony Minghella would have done well to take out a few scenes in which Kidman's character, Ada Monroe, moons over Inman (Jude Law).  However, the characters's individual journeys, one toward self-sufficiency and the other toward home and stability in an unstable world, turn the film into a powerhouse worthy to be adapted from Charles Frazier's novel.

Although she originally wanted to play Ada, Zellweger's portrayal of the down-to-earth Ruby was true to the mountain woman of that time, a woman practical enough to know that pretty things are nice, but preferring to acknowledge the harsh realities of life.  When Zellweger lays her cards on the table in the first two minutes she appears on screen -- telling the educated, but unskilled, Ada that they will share the same dinner table, and then breaking a rooster's neck with the firm declaration that she "can't stand a floggin' rooster" -- I knew Zellweger had hit on the heartbeat of Appalachian femininity.  She also captures the rhythm, tone, and syntax of mountain dialect.  She, above all the other actors, has the most authentic sounding Appalachian accent.  The movie doesn't put many Appalachian phrases or words into play, but thanks to Zellwegger's rendering of the mountain persona, that is not painfully obvious.  Zellwegger stole every scene, which is why I cheered when she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

The entire supporting cast comes together, not only to make the less-than-palatable love story between Inman and Ada Monroe seem real, but also to bring the Romanian forests right back to the Blue Ridge.  Teague (Ray Winstone) gives us a glimpse at the Scottish and Irish heritage of the Blue Ridge Highlands, with the detectable brogue mixed in with a southern accent.  He also illustrates the importance of land to the mountain people's identity.  His family owned Cold Mountain first, and therefore, he feels it is his, even though it's not legal.  I appreciated his portrayal of the "land-hungry" mountain man more so than the usual Hatfield and McCoy feuding stereotype.  Maddy (Eileen Atkins) provides the picture of elderly Appalachian femininity.  She was probably as fiery as Ruby in her youth, but now she is kind and observant and willing to bear burdens for those she loves.  Still stubborn and intelligent, she figures out a way to get her fields plowed even though her sons are at war.  Her common sense lets her live through hard times because she accepts life's harshness.

The common sense of the mountaineer is only overruled by the presence of folkloric superstitions.  Maddy believes in looking down the well with a mirror to see the future, although she would not readily admit it to anyone.  Stobrod Thewes (Brendan Gleeson) is the wayward father of our favorite mountain girl, Ruby, who also leads a band of mountain musicians.  His portrayal and the music he plays capture the atmosphere of the Appalachians.  The sound of the fiddle played to a hard-life tune or a high-steppin' celebration song invokes the hardscrabble, changeable fortune of the mountain people at this time.  Similarly, the beauty and exactness of the shape note singing is not only accurate to the region's musical history, but also captures the nature of mountain survival.  They didn't let hymns die in the mountains, isolated from their roots, but instead cultivated them into a communal ritual full of tragic beauty.  Living, dependant on nature, in harsh country carved a certain element of tragedy in this people's history that can only be fully recognized through a song, or a movie that gives attention to detail.

This film soars most at the moments it is most true to its setting.  Charles Frazier wrote the novel in the context of Appalachia, and the parts of the film that capture the Appalachian spirit of survival are the parts that sustain the film.  The cinematography made to look like the Blue Ridge, the use of music, the supporting characters, and the culture surrounding the main love story create the framework that make Cold Mountain a success.  But most of all, the heart of the movie lies in its message of hope in the midst of trouble.  This is a large part of the spirit of Appalachian survival, but it is also a message for us all.  Cold Mountain is a symbol of home for Inman, Ada, and Ruby, but it is also a reminder that hope always stands in the midst of hardship, providing us with a place to return when life's turmoil is unbearable.