A film without insight into good and evil

Rating: 5/10 (1 October 2014)

Loosely based on Homer's 'Odyssey', 'Cold Mountain' tells the story of the final days of the American Civil War, and one man's struggle to get home. Unfortunately, it's also a world where the heroes, even when supposedly starving, have 21st century muscles, and the heroines all have 21st century teeth. More than that, they have 21st century values as well: I'm not saying that all southerners were slave-owning bigots, but the film establishes very early on where it's coming from, where the hero shows, in the very first scene, what was surely very unusual courtesy from a southerner to a black man, while shortly afterwards the heroine declares her happiness to be away from slaves, though without specifying the nature of her objection. Which means, of course, that the film offers no insights into how white people, viewed as having the highest moral character in their own community, could have fought a war ultimately for the purpose of the right to enslave others. Meanwhile, the various foes who stand in the path of a happy ending are all depicted as evil and venal, in contrast to the nobility and modernity of the sympathetic characters. This is less history than 'The Lord of the Rings'; where moral merit is not a judgement passed on a set of behaviours in a particular environment, but rather an innate property of the good and the beautiful.