Cold Mountain left me a bit chilly

Rating: Null/10 (10 July 2004)

When I saw Cold Mountain, I felt that there was a costume party, with Nicole Kidman coming as a beautiful Southern belle and Renee Zellweger coming as a poor mountain girl (with bathtub white teeth and lipstick, which woman did not wear in that era). Despite all this, Zellweger was probably the best thing going for this film, that and the wonderful scenery.
The worst thing going was the history misinformation. The mountain areas of the South were not rebel hotbeds. The most mountainous part of Virginia seceded from VIRGINIA, and named itself West Virginia and fought for the union. The mountainous, eastern third of Tennessee was solidly with the North also, and would have seceded from Tennessee if not held captive by the rest of the state. This is because there was little cotton grown in the mountains and therefore very few slaves. There WERE some Confederate-leaning counties in the mountains of North Carolina, but areas like that weren't solidly pro-Southern, and there was a lot of the neighbor-against-neighbor thing going on. The anti- secession sentiment in the mountains was accurately addressed (albeit briefly) in the book.