This article is so good I decided to post it here. I think most of us will end up seeing this film.
Civil War, Take 2
Hollywood Captured The Blood of Battle But Shrank Away From Slavery's Reality
By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 24, 2003; Page C01
CHARLOTTESVILLE
A movie theater seems an odd place to be seeking historical truth, and the three University of Virginia professors look just a shade uncomfortable with the enterprise. There they sit on this December night, holding microphones onstage in Newcomb Hall, facing an auditorium full of movie buffs who have come to check out the Virginia Film Festival's preview screening of "Cold Mountain." The security guards who patrolled the aisles to prevent illicit videotaping are gone by now. Their job was to safeguard the screen images of Nicole Kidman, Jude Law and Renee Zellweger, not the post-film analysis of Gary Gallagher, Edward Ayers and Stephen Cushman.
The professors' assignment is a harder one. They are to judge the historical accuracy of what they've just seen.
On its face, this task is absurd. Director Anthony Minghella's take on the Civil War era, after all, is a second-generation work of fiction, based as it is on novelist Charles Frazier's 1997 bestseller of the same name.
Yet if you want to understand the way Americans process their past, the analysis of such fictional "history" is a perfectly reasonable enterprise. For, as real historians know all too well, the Hollywood Version has more influence on what we believe than all their efforts combined.
"Cold Mountain," which opens in Washington tomorrow, tells the story of a wounded Confederate deserter named Inman (Law) who turns his back on what he has come to see as war's dehumanizing slaughter to trek hundreds of miles home to the mountains of North Carolina and to Ada (Kidman), the woman he loves but barely knows. Inman's journey is intercut with the story of Ada and Ruby (Zellweger), a tough-minded rural type who teaches her city-bred friend how to survive in a harsh landscape made harsher by war.
Frazier based Inman on an ancestor about whom little is known. Filling the gaps with a combination of research and imagination, he deliberately set out to create a kind of American Odyssey -- which makes the historical question seem even more dubious. Does anyone ask whether Homer is "accurate"?
But Gallagher, who is one of the most prominent students of Civil War, knows what he's up against here. "I think 'Gone With the Wind' has shaped what people think about the Civil War probably more than everything we've written put together, or put together and squared," he says. Nobody thinks this film will have that kind of impact, but it will surely have more than his own work or that of any other academic historian.
Before this night's discussion is over, Gallagher and his U-Va. colleagues will field questions about the film's take on slavery, on the role of Civil War women, and on the nature of home-front vigilantism in "our beloved South." Ed Ayers will respond in part by pointing out that Minghella's movie is structured more like a western than a true Civil War film. Yet the screen version of "Cold Mountain" -- unlike the book -- begins with a powerful depiction of an especially horrific battle that took place in 1864, during the siege of Petersburg. So it is hardly surprising that one questioner comes back to that as well.
"At the very beginning, when the Union army put all the explosives underground, was that an actual event?" he asks.
The answer is: Yes, but.
Yes, Union engineers did tunnel under the Confederate lines at Petersburg, and yes, they blew a big hole in them, and yes, the Union troops who tried to capitalize on this were pinned down and slaughtered in the enormous crater created by the explosion. Along with other historians who've had a chance to see "Cold Mountain," Gallagher thinks this sequence is one of the best evocations of Civil War combat ever put on film. But as he and these other historians are also quick to note, one of the keys to understanding the real Battle of the Crater is the heavy involvement of African American troops there and the bungling of their deployment by the Union high command.
And if you go looking for this story line, either in Frazier's book or in the hellish orange haze the filmmakers throw over their painstakingly re-created battlefield, you will look in vain.
Confederate Romania
We'll get back to those ill-starred black soldiers soon enough. But first, a couple of other facts to note about Minghella's battlefield:
For one thing, it's in Romania.
For another, the hundreds of extras hunkered down in Union and Confederate uniforms are not the usual enthusiastic Civil War reenactors. They're active-duty Romanian Army troops.
And, strange though it seems, this makes the Battle of the Crater seem more "real."
The decision to shoot "Cold Mountain" overseas was made largely for financial reasons, and because Minghella wanted countryside with the kind of unspoiled, 19th-century feel that's hard to find in North Carolina these days.
And why not? He "made it quite clear that he's not a Civil War buff or a historian," says Brian Pohanka, an Alexandria-based writer and historical consultant who was hired to help with the battle scenes. The British director, Pohanka says in a telephone interview, saw "Cold Mountain" less as a Civil War film than as "a personal drama" set against the backdrop of the war. Still, Minghella, who also wrote the screenplay, wanted to get as many things right as he could while making the fighting realistic enough to explain the deserter Inman's state of mind.
To this end, Pohanka enlisted two other military consultants, veteran reenactors John Bert and Michael Kraus, to help work with the Romanians. For weeks, they taught the soldiers to wear their uniforms, carry their weapons and perform tactical maneuvers in the manner of Union and Confederate troops.
These were "fresh fish," Pohanka recalls, just like raw Civil War recruits. What's more, unlike the often older and heavier American reenactors who tend to show up in such films as "Gettysburg" and "Gods and Generals," the Romanians were young and lean, with bad teeth and an overall hungry look that brought to mind the gaunt figures in Mathew Brady photographs. Watching them training in a muddy field one day, Bert thought: "Oh, my God, we're looking at something that in our country we haven't seen in 140 years."
Bert, Kraus and Pohanka -- along with historical painter and collector Don Troiani, who was hired to help with the Civil War uniforms and other material details -- all testify that the filmmakers worked hard to get things right. Troiani says they took his advice on perhaps 80 percent of the points he raised, "which is really good for the movies."
The consultants praise the way the uniforms, insignias and battle flags turned out, and the fact that the correct Union regiments, in the correct alignment, are shown advancing to the Crater. They marvel at the re-creation of the Confederate trenches and fortifications -- "we were like little kids going through that," Pohanka says -- though they were alarmed, at one point, to see so many flags flying over the earthworks that they looked like something out of a Renaissance Fair. (The filmmakers agreed to remove some.) And they generally laud the re-creation of what Kraus calls "one of the most vicious, senseless battles of the Civil War."
That said, there were problems they couldn't fix.
Take the guard towers that loom ominously over the Confederate lines like relics from the "Schindler's List" set. "If I had one cannon, my first shot is to knock that down," Kraus says. "I don't know where they got those." Apparently, the production designer felt the need for something on that scale to fill out the frame.
Or take the enormous siege guns the Confederates are shown manhandling into position. Couldn't happen, unless you were dealing with lightweight fiberglass reproductions, and besides, guns of that size would have been far behind the lines. "We said: 'Why?' They said, 'The little ones look like toys,' " Bert explains.
Some inauthenticities were corrected by the filmmakers themselves. Jay Tavare, who plays a Cherokee character in Inman's regiment, "wanted to fight Ninja style," Kraus says. "I heard Anthony say, 'Jay, you're not an action figure.' " But other flaws inevitably crept in. The time between the explosion and the Union attack, for example, was radically condensed for dramatic reasons. The Crater itself seemed to the consultants to be a little too deep and steep-walled.
There were those missing persons, too, of course.
Yes, you could see a black face or two in the swirl of fighting. But Pohanka says he'd have liked to see many more black troops involved.
The Larger Question
Back at the screening here, after the prolonged applause that greets the end of the film, the talk is less of uniforms and battlefields than of the larger historical landscape. Intense though it is, after all, the Crater sequence occupies only a few minutes of the 21/2-hour film. Most of "Cold Mountain" is devoted to Inman's temptations and bloody travails on his long walk home; to Ada and Ruby's attempt to work the land without male help; and to the depredations of the local posses known as the Home Guard.
The broad context for all this is what Ayers, a historian whose work has focused more on the home front than the battlefield, refers to as the "backwash" of the Civil War. And the first question from the audience goes straight to the believability of Minghella's period evocation: Were the members of the Home Guard really as brutal as the movie shows them to be?
The answer -- isn't it always, with historians? -- is complicated.
"The war in western North Carolina got very, very nasty," Gallagher says. But "it's overdrawn in this movie, I think." Home Guardsmen, whose mission included returning escaped slaves to their masters and sending deserters back to the rebel lines, mostly didn't go around "killing people indiscriminately and torturing women." Ayers agrees, adding that "Cold Mountain" seems to conflate the Home Guard with what people at the time called "bushwhackers": violent, opportunistic outlaws with no loyalty to either side.
But Columbia University historian Eric Foner, who has also previewed the film, doesn't fully agree. He would never call this or any other movie "accurate," Foner says. Yet he notes that there was considerable Union sentiment in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee (a point not made in "Cold Mountain") and that the authorities there "did prey very violently" on those deemed insufficiently loyal to the South -- which helps explain the bitter conflicts that continued after the war. Thus he sees the film as "illuminating something real."
Next question: What about the way women are portrayed in "Cold Mountain"?
Let's deal with the frivolous part first. The one thing period experts seem to agree on is that even when Ada, Nicole Kidman's character, is leading a hardscrabble life, she looks far too good to be true -- especially when it comes to her distinctly non-period hair. Zellweger wins Most Believable Actress, hands down. Jude Law gets high marks for scruffiness as well.
A more serious topic is the movie's seeming determination to turn the "Gone With the Wind" stereotype of pro-war, pro-slavery Southern womanhood on its head. "When you watch this film you have a sense that there are no white women in the Confederacy who support the Confederate war effort," Gallagher says, but this is "a grotesque distortion." Ada is supposed to be a transplanted Charleston belle, raised in the heart of the slaveholding South, yet she's skeptical about the war from the beginning, and practically the first words out of her mouth establish her anti-slavery sentiments. "What's wrong with that picture?" the historian asks.
This brings the discussion around to what Ayers calls "the great central problem of all of American history -- race and slavery."
And how did the filmmakers do on that one?
"They ducked," he says.
The Whole Story
Yes, they ducked. They made slavery virtually invisible in the mountains of North Carolina, which it was not. They made all their major Southern characters sympathetic, or at the very least silent, on the issue. They put unlikely anti-slavery speeches into the mouths of minor Southern characters, such as the doctor in the hospital where Inman recovers, outside of which you see a tableau of cotton-picking slaves for, oh, 30 seconds or so.
But Gary Gallagher, for one, doesn't think any of this should come as a surprise.
"Americans are so uncomfortable with slavery," he says. "Slavery and race are the great bugaboos for us in terms of really coming to terms with our past. It's just so raw still." And to expect a commercial fiction film to confront raw truths that American culture as a whole prefers to avoid would be, well -- unrealistic.
Still, it's good to be aware of what history chooses to delete, even when it's the Hollywood kind. So if you're planning to see this lovingly crafted picture, which just got eight Golden Globe nominations and is generating an unusual amount of advance critical buzz -- and which does try, in many important ways, to present an "accurate" picture of the American past -- it might be just as well to understand what happened outside Petersburg on that awful July day in 1864.
What you need to know about the Union side of things is this: After the decision had been made to tunnel under the Confederate lines, a division of United States Colored Troops was carefully trained to lead the assault. Among other things, they were to attack to the left and right of the hole created by the explosion. "Nobody was supposed to go into it," says Chris Calkins, chief of interpretation at Petersburg National Battlefield, which will offer special walking tours of the Crater, beginning on Dec. 27.
But at the last minute, Calkins says, the Union commander decided to have untrained white troops lead the assault instead. Among the reasons given was the fear of political repercussions in the North if things went badly and the black troops were seen as being deliberately sent to be slaughtered. As it happened, however, they were thrown into the battle anyway, after the tired and badly led whites -- who had never been told that they were supposed to avoid the big hole -- had poured into it and been pinned down.
So they still ended up with the highest rate of casualties of any Union division in the fight. And meanwhile, a golden opportunity had been lost.
As for what you need to know about the other side: This was the first major battle in Virginia in which black units participated, and the Southern troops didn't like it. "The call went up and down the Confederate lines that there were black soldiers fighting here, come and kill one of them," Gallagher says.
Celebrated Civil War chronicler Shelby Foote was asked by the producers of "Cold Mountain" to read and comment on the screenplay, and he says he caught one serious inaccuracy in the Crater scene: a description of Union prisoners -- it wasn't clear if they were black or white -- being executed well after they had surrendered. This wouldn't have happened, Foote says, and the incident does not appear in the finished film.
But Foote joins Gallagher, Calkins and other historians in confirming that the Confederates at the Crater killed many black soldiers who were trying to surrender. "They were really furious," Foote says. "Every ounce of racism that was in them flared up."
It's not as if the filmmakers didn't know this when they chose the Battle of the Crater to kick off their epic tale. Kraus, the military adviser, tells of watching a scene being filmed in Romania in which a Confederate soldier, screaming racial epithets, shoots a wounded black man in cold blood. This didn't make the finished film either, and Kraus thinks he understands why. What he says applies to more than just one scene in one Hollywood movie: It echoes more than a century's worth of choices about how we Americans want our Civil War history refined.
"It was kind of over-the-top painful," Kraus says, "and it didn't fit into the story line."
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