A historian reviews Jude Law’s 2003 romantic Civil War drama for accuracy. Based on a novel by Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain starred Law alongside Renée Zellweger and Nicole Kidman in an epic drama partially set during America’s bloodiest conflict. Directed by Anthony Minghella, the film featured as a centerpiece a recreation of a notorious real incident from the war in which Union soldiers blew up the Confederate lines with a mass of explosives, only to themselves become trapped in the resulting crater, making it easy for Confederate troops to pick them off.
This brutal based-on-fact scene is the action high-point of Minghella’s film, but unfortunately it’s not entirely accurate according to one expert. In a video for Insider, historian Garry Adelman praised Cold Mountain for its dramatic power, even as he accused the film of sacrificing realism in order to achieve its effect. According to Adelman, the “turkey shoot” scene is “overdone” in capturing the brutality of the moment it recreates. Adelman also criticized the film for leaving out a particular detail of the real incident, in which the Union bomb initially didn’t go off, forcing a courageous soldier to risk death in order to relight the fuse. Check out what the historian said in the space below (around 16:04 of the clip):
You see them lighting the fuse and then putting sandbags up because they didn’t want the explosion coming back their way. This actually happened, but one thing I really wish they could have included was that they lit the fuse and waited five, ten minutes and nothing happened, and then they had to remove the sandbags and the bravest man in the world had to go into that shaft and find out where it had broken and splice it and light that thing again and run back out, and it worked all right.
The unit had made careful plans for this attack, and part of that plan is of course to get the the Union soldiers as close to the coming crater as possible so that they’re going to cross the least amount of ground as possible before they were on top of the enemy. The ferocity of the blast ripping clothes off of people, so many would have been just absolutely disintegrated in the initial blast. I think it’s something like 300 South Carolinians just gone
This idea of the turkey shoot – they’ve got themselves trapped in their own hole – is true, but not like you see it in the movie. First of all, the attack into the crater was part of a much larger attack with Union soldiers really exploiting some of their gains. Over the course of an hour or so, the Confederates are able to muster soldiers from another part of the battlefield that were able to come and then sort of push the Union soldiers back and shoot down upon those Union soldiers at the same time. So they weren’t exactly surrounding the Union soldiers, who were hapless inside the crater. Some were in there to be sure but other soldiers are on both sides of the crater as well.
I would give it a five. Some of it’s so overdone. It’s such a dramatic scene but it’s very effective outside of its accuracy.
Cold Mountain Was A Triumph – For Renée Zellweger
Featuring a cast loaded with stars, an Oscar-winning director and a story taken from a best-selling novel, Cold Mountain seemed set up to achieve awards glory. But when Oscar nomination time rolled around, the film was surprisingly shut out of the Best Picture and Best Director categories. The lone Oscar nabbed by the movie went to Zellweger, who received a Best Supporting Actress award for her performance as the plucky Ruby Thewes.
Cold Mountain may not have been a huge Oscar-night juggernaut, but the film remains an entertaining Civil War epic, filled with good performances, and gorgeously shot by Oscar-nominee John Seale. Unfortunately, at least according to one expert, the film is not as accurate as it could be in its depiction of the horrors of the Civil War.
