Last week, Stephanie Zacharek wrote a review of the movie Cold Mountain that, disappointingly (because I usually love her reviews, to the point that I developed a writer-type crush on her), stooped to some really dumb misconceptions of Civil War-era Southerners. I decided to write a letter to the editor that didn't get published, probably because a bunch of other people wrote pretty much exactly what I wrote. In the end, it was probably a good thing that my letter didn't get published since it rambles and doesn't introduce the topic or make relevant references. But here it is anyway (and, if you subscribe to Salon, you can read the orginal review here and the other letters here):

As someone who is almost always a huge fan of Stephanie Zacharek's movie reviews, I was really disappointed by her ignorant review of Cold Mountain. While a lot of her points about the directing and acting in Cold Mountain are good ones, her main reasons for not liking it seem to be that it contradicts the notion that the entire Civil War South was exactly as it was portrayed in Gone With The Wind.

The fact is that the slave-holding, wealthy whites were a small minority in the South. The majority of Southern whites were poor and rural, and there were very few black people in the high mountains where most of Cold Mountain is set. Both Charles Frazier and Anthony Minghella's portrayals of life in the North Carolina mountains during the Civil War were historically accurate. The "minimal acknowledgment" of African-Americans in Cold Mountain isn't some attempt to gloss over unpleasant politics, but is a simple fact of the population of that time and place.

Slavery is a horrible institution, and is and always will be a huge embarrassment to this country and to the South especially, but does that mean that the white Southerners who were subjected to starvation, poverty, rape, robbery and torture during the Civil War weren't really suffering? And because they weren't black slaves, does that mean that their story isn't worth telling? Would it be better for Minghella to change the racial makeup of the population of the North Carolina mountains so that it looks more like the Civil War South that the historically ignorant wish it was: nothing but rich white people who are always busy repressing their black slaves?

Zacharek's ignorance of Civil War history is most notable when she refers to the battle at the beginning of the movie as being "somewhere in Virginia." Two minutes of research and she would have known that the battle was in Petersburg. Alternately, she could have picked it up by paying attention when "Petersburg, Virginia" was written on the screen during the movie. Not that she cares where in Virginia it is, since I'm sure it's all the same to her. Why bother making distinctions when the thousands of miles and millions of people in the Civil War South can be summed up with massive, widely accepted generalizations?