War is heaven

Imagine a culture in which there is little irony or sarcasm. Where God’s will is a staple of civic discourse. Where multitasking does not exist. Where soldiers march toward enemy fire in a suicidal massed formation.

Those are just a few reasons why it’s so hard to translate America’s most important years -- the Civil War -- for a modern audience.

The latest director to run the gantlet is Anthony Minghella (“The English Patient,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley”), whose adaptation of Charles Frazier’s stark romance “Cold Mountain” opened Christmas Day.

“Cold Mountain” is not a battle story. It’s the tale of a Confederate deserter (Jude Law) and his Homeric journey through the Blue Ridge Mountains, back to the woman he loves (Nicole Kidman), who has been struggling to survive on her dead father’s farm with a rugged handywoman (Renee Zellweger).

Nevertheless, historians warn that Minghella, who also wrote the script, is treading on quicksand: Stay too true to the times and risk being accused of championing values that make us uncomfortable in 21st century America. Or try to make allowances and risk being accused of trading authenticity for bigger box office.

Minghella tries to communicate the Civil War’s corrosive power by showing rather than telling -- offering dozens of small, desperate moments rather than asking any character to make sense of the madness, a temptation that has doomed many historical movies.

The men and women of “Cold Mountain” are locked in a struggle for survival that descends in every war: An elderly woman, out of food, slits her goat’s throat slowly yet tenderly, murmuring, “You done good, girl.” A Union soldier lays a baby on icy ground to coerce its mother. A musician sings plaintively, “I know my passing is rough and steep....” Kidman’s character spits out her frustration at a well-heeled life that left her unprepared: “This fence,” she says as she drags a tree trunk into place, “is the first thing I’ve ever done that might produce an actual result!” Lonely men and women ache for the slightest human intimacy. “You wake up,” one of them says, “and your ribs are bruised thinking so hard on somebody.”

Minghella shows us 19th century society’s firm grounding in religion when Zellweger’s character, abandoned and unsentimental to the bone, growls at the sight of a murdered family, “This world won’t stand long! God won’t let it.” The director employs the same subtlety to comment on the foolishness of young men’s expectations. They burst out of Cold Mountain’s church when North Carolina secedes, shouting, “We got our war!” Law’s character is kissing Kidman’s character goodbye when a soldier runs by and laughs, “He’ll be back in a month!” An earnest belief in folk ritual is illustrated when Kidman looks into a well and sees Law coming home to her.

If this collection of moments works, it is because Minghella was determined not to fall prey to the pressure of making a film where historical narrative overwhelmed human drama.

“The film is not a history lesson,” he said. “It doesn’t exist to stand in for a study of a real event. Rather, it tries to cast light on some circumstances which surround any war.... If I thought I was making a Civil War film, then I wouldn’t have taken this project on.... I mired myself in Civil War books, but this book stands in relation to the Civil War as ‘The Odyssey’ stands in relation to the Greek and Trojan Wars. It’s not a movie about generals and politicians.... It’s about people who get caught up in tensions they often don’t understand.”

Debates over accuracy

Most Civil War films, by contrast, have focused on the luminaries, often triggering an accuracy debate between partisans.

The most recent example was “Gods and Generals,” the elaborate 3 1/2-hour movie about the first two years of the Civil War that was released early this year. Based on Jeff Shaara’s historical novel and banked by Ted Turner, the movie followed generals from North and South through a series of crucial pre-Gettysburg battles. The film lavished most attention on Southern Gen. Stonewall Jackson and his religious devotion to the Confederacy.

It seemed hardly an accident that reviewers for Washington, D.C.’s newspapers split across political lines. The conservative Washington Times proclaimed that director-screenwriter Ronald Maxwell “sustains the solemnly stirring opening mood of this Civil War epic for its entire 230 minutes” and “duplicates the admirably unfashionable blend of sincerity, dedication and human interest” of his 1993 film “Gettysburg” (based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Shaara’s late father, Michael).

The liberal Washington Post, by contrast, faulted “Gods and Generals” for its overemphasis of Southern righteousness: “This movie is clearly intended as something of a Confederate Honor Restoration Project, in which the men of the South are cut loose from the weight of slavery’s evil and portrayed as God-fearing, patriotic, noble and heroic.” The Post also sneered at “the tone of irony-free earnestness not found in an American movie in at least 30 years.”

Maxwell was well aware of this conflict. On his website he posted an essay that quoted Robert Penn Warren’s notion of two irreconcilable Civil War myths: for the South, “The Great Alibi,” which attempts to enshrine the best motives for independence, deemphasizing slavery; and for the North, the “Treasury of Virtue,” a “plenary indulgence, for all sins past, present and future, freely given by the hand of history.”

A filmmaker “must do his best to keep [such] contemporary pressures out of the work,” Maxwell wrote. “If not, the work risks being a sanitized, lame and gratuitous exercise in political correctness.”

A religious culture

Still, to watch Maxwell’s characters like Jackson and Robert E. Lee continually voice their faith in God is stunning to many viewers in an era governed by separation of church and state.

“It’s hard to convey the kind of more formal and religious culture the Civil War soldiers came from, compared to our sometimes more cynical culture,” said James M. McPherson, author of the Pulitzer-winning “Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era,” which won praise for its analysis of the war’s complex causes. “The value system and the concepts of honor and duty and what they would call ‘manhood’ were something that the Victorian generation took more literally than we do. In our postmodern age, we are as likely as not to take these things not literally but ironically.”

Says “Gods and Generals” author Shaara, who was not involved in the making of the film: “I’ve heard people say, surprised, ‘Gee, these characters seem to be caught up in religion’ -- and they were. That’s a product of the time. That doesn’t play well to a modern audience.”

It bothers Shaara to hear the movie filtered through modern sensibilities -- to hear, as some have suggested, “that by fusing a religious aspect we are giving [the characters] a Republican conservative political bent. That has nothing to do with it.”

McPherson said Maxwell went too far in his effort to convey “the religiosity and idealism” of the Southern generals and by showing that their passion for states’ rights -- not slavery -- was the motivation for secession. This, McPherson and other historians said, is a common oversimplification in Civil War movies, going as far back as “Birth of a Nation” and “Gone With the Wind.”

Ronald Rietveld, a Cal State Fullerton history professor who teaches a class on Civil War films, cited “Glory,” the 1989 account of a Massachusetts African American regiment, as that rare Civil War film with a Northern perspective.

“I wish somebody would do a really good movie on the causes of the Civil War,” McPherson said. “Most of them are a little bit too deferential to what they perceive as a Southern white audience; they don’t want to offend, they tend to gloss over the fact that the South started the war; it was the Southern states that took the initiative in causing the crisis by seceding because they feared Lincoln’s election portended a major threat to slavery. That is a message a lot of people don’t want to hear.”

Shaara said he did not deal with roots of the Civil War in his novel. “I’m one of these people who doesn’t believe there was any one cause. There was a lack of awareness of the political world. I don’t have great long-winded speeches about that in my book because I have chosen to look at these people as individuals.”

Rietveld despairs that Hollywood’s desire for romance robs Civil War movies of the sheer toll.

“Six hundred twenty-nine thousand,” he says, referring to the number of soldiers who died during the Civil War. “And that doesn’t include civilian dead.... There’s a whole realm missing to the actual event. It’s hard for film to capture that. Perhaps that’s the problem of the medium itself -- there’s no smell.”

Even the way the men threw themselves into battle is hard for audiences to fathom, McPherson said. “The tactical formations for combat, close-order attacks, massed groups of regiments and brigades moving in a compact formation” against enemy fire. “I’ve heard people say, ‘Why did they do it that way?’ They didn’t have radios or any other means of controlling soldiers except by voice.... The Civil War infantry tactics were not much different from the Napoleonic era.”

The passage of time also conspires against filmmakers, Rietveld said. He remembered as a teenage history buff talking with the son of Lincoln’s White House gardener. “This was an afternoon with a man who knew Lincoln, who remembered when soldiers came to the White House” after the assassination. “Someone who could see it in his own head. We’ve lost that. What we have is what Hollywood has romanticized.”

Against this backdrop, “Cold Mountain” is a welcomed change -- there is romance, but not in the pronouncements or characterizations of famous generals. The romance lies in the way Law and Kidman all but breathe each other’s names as they struggle to reunite in a civilization that has broken down, whose redemption is scarcely imaginable.

As Minghella says, “The best use of film is to flex between the landscape and the individual. And this is a story where the land is constantly flexing between the big rhythms of warfare and the tiny detail of human behavior.”