The Hollywood Dream Factory rarely chronicles actual events with anything like historical accuracy. But that's not the business of storytelling of the highest order. We want our movies to evoke something more than the way it really was, something transcendent that distills place, time, character to their sharpest essence.
Consider "The Magnificent Ambersons," in which Orson Welles lovingly captured, in lustrous black and white, the end of a world. Probably that gilded, genteel age existed only in the snow-orb of the director's imagination. Yet no socio-economic analysis can rival Welles' dream: his "Ambersons" witnesses for a grace lost forever in the painful, necessary birth of the new, American 20th century, driven by trains, planes and automobiles.
No such shock of recognition awaits us in the witless "Mona Lisa Smile." Set in 1953 at Wellesley College, Julia Roberts' latest star vehicle aims to conjure up the flavor of another turning point in American history - feminism's first baby steps. As a fashionably bohemian art-history teacher, a free-spirited Californian out of her element in the Effete East, Roberts tries to wake up a clutch of bright but narrow-minded young women to modern art and the possibility that they have been brainwashed into believing marriage is their end-all and be-all.
It's "The Prime of Miss Julia Roberts": wearing that ever-tremulous smile or throwing tantrums, she swans through this pastel-shaded soap opera like the patron saint of women's liberation, just too good for benighted Wellesley (!) and its hidebound ilk. Examples of distaff martyrdom are set up like sitting ducks: a lesbian who gives out contraceptives is summarily canned; Roberts' jilted landlady drowns her grief in tippling and TV; a girl trapped in a loveless marriage tries to destroy her friends' happiness; and so on, one cartoon after another.
Still, there are a couple of breakouts from wall-to-wall cliché. The adorable Maggie Gyllenhaal plays her bad-girl part like a latterday F. Scott Fitzgerald heroine, and Julia Stiles invests the role of a consciously conventional girl with such surprising gravitas, she makes Roberts, in full anti-marriage rant, look (a little) like a neurotic harridan.
But sitting through "Mona Lisa Smile" is like watching all the rich, complicated, ambiguous, ambivalent, sometimes killing realities of growing up female in the '50s turned into tapioca. When Roberts and her coven approach their first Jackson Pollock with silly expressions of poleaxed awe; when a screeching Roberts deconstructs girdle ads for her clueless class; when Roberts, in full self-righteous mode, dumps her Italian-teacher boyfriend (Dominic West, wasted) not because he's been openly boffing one of her students but because he's spun a war-hero story to cover the fact he never got overseas; when Ms. Chips triumphantly exits the Wellesley scene, her car escorted by smiling, bike-riding acolytes - I fairly ached for some way of talking back to this bloodless drivel, to rebut its reductive reading of my hard times, its dissing of women and men who braved feminism's true sea-change.
Like "Mona Lisa Smile," "Cold Mountain" exists to show us extraordinarily beautiful people acting out familiar emotional tropes in attractively designed and visualized settings. However, Anthony Minghella's adaptation of Charles Frazier's finely crafted Civil War novel is much more engaging to watch, partly because of the bell-jar production values and partly because the faces of the film's lovers, Nicole Kidman (Ada) and Jude Law (Inman), are still fresh to us, still loved by the camera, while Julia Roberts' "Joker" grin and hyena laugh have begun to wear thin from too much exposure.
In Minghella's hands, the novel's dry, terrible detail - accrued during a Confederate soldier's long journey home and the privations his beloved suffers as she waits for his return - has been largely sanitized for our Miramaxed consumption. The whole film looks as though it's been Photoshop'd to a fare-thee-well, until it's all sheen and sepia tones, tastefully appointed vignettes and perfectly composed frames.
Ada's brief period of starvation is signaled by a few hectic spots of red on her pale cheeks. Within a few scenes after handywoman/fieldhand Ruby's arrival, Kidman's all a-glow again, her uncombed hair caught up in a chic pigtail. Indeed, in her black fedora and man's long coat, abroad in a snowy landscape, she looks like nothing so much as one of those Ralph Lauren adverts for faux-rugged outdoors wear.
And, really, you've got to hoot when the newly arrived Ruby (Renée Zellweger) discreetly turns her back to the camera to rip off the head of a nasty rooster who's been assaulting poor Ada. Wouldn't want any tender souls in the audience to actually see how people killed chickens in those days. And just one more demur from a onetime country girl: Would you casually kill your only rooster when you needed every chicken and egg you could grow?
Rarely does anything really live and breathe in "Cold Mountain"'s airless atmosphere, although Zellweger's feisty farmgirl, Philip Seymour Hoffman's deliciously lecherous reverend and Brendan Gleeson's no-'count fiddler give it an enthusiastic try. (Also, Jack White of White Stripes fame delivers a nearly wordless performance of surpassing sweetness.) But these idiosyncratics are incidental to the film's embalmed, golden heart, the love affair between Inman and Ada that beats us metronomically toward an ending "Cold Mountain" has telegraphed from the get-go. And getting there is no fun, since the saga doesn't advance with satisfying organic inevitability; every event seems strangely discrete from the next, like wooden beads lined up on a windowsill.
The pity and terror that ought to attend the horrific battle at the start is missing. When Inman's trench explodes, the frame becomes a painting impressionistically brushed in hues of red and sulphurous yellow, and a body, its clothes blown away, hangs momentarily suspended in mid-air. Your eyes register the aesthetic elements; you do not feel that man's searing agony. He is part of a design, not tragedy. In the heat of battle, an Indian pauses to stare into his adversary's black face. The irony is thumpingly obvious. We are not enlarged by unresonant, contrived images like this one, reducing fratricidal horror to kneejerk political correctness.
Unlike "Mona Lisa Smile," "Cold Mountain" doesn't warrant scorched-earth criticism. Minghella's "historical" epic is ultimately just dull, a taxidermist's idea of romance. But the film gifts us with one absolutely authentic element: its music. Sung by Jack White, Alison Krauss and others, the traditional folk and gospel songs included on the soundtrack speak purely to the heart, of times and places that are part of an American history that can be traced back to Elizabethan England. Produced by T-Bone Burnett of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" fame, the CD features two unforgettable hymns by the Sacred Harp Singers of Liberty Church, Alabama. In these a capella performances, you'll find a raw, wild passion more pagan than Christian. Too bad that brand of passion never warms "Cold Mountain" to life.
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