Cold Mountain

Rating

Director

Anthony Minghella

Screenplay

Anthony Minghella (Novel: Charles Frazier)

Length

154 min.

Starring

Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Renee Zellweger, Eileen Atkins, Brendan Gleeson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Natalie Portman, Giovanni Ribisi, Donald Sutherland, Ray Winstone, Kathy Baker, James Gammon, Charlie Hunnam, Jack White, Ethan Suplee, Jena Malone, Melora Walters, Lucas Black

MPAA Rating

R (For violence and sexuality)

Review

The long road home is a dangerous one for a young Confederate soldier injured in battle.

Jude Law, a commanding presence on the screen, plays W.P. Inman who is forced to join the Civil War when the South declares independence from the North. The war falls on the heels of a blossoming romance with the minister’s daughter, Ada Monroe (Nicole Kidman) who knows nothing of the quiet small town life and has only her father (Donald Sutherland) to keep her company after Inman’s departure.

Kidman’s beauty plays well for her early in the film. She’s like a diamond lost in a dark cave. However, as the war takes its toll on her small town, her appearance and performance should change but don’t. Her father dies and she is forced to take a more active role in the upkeep of her family farm, which an unscrupulous acting sheriff wants desperately to control.

It’s impossible for her to live off the land, despite help from her neighbor Sally (Kathy Baker in a terrific performance), until a Ruby Thewes (Renee Zellweger), a tomboy to be sure, arrives to help her take control of the farm and turn it into a sustaining entity. Zellweger presents a wonderful, if not hackneyed, routine as she puts aside her glamour and adopts a deeply southern accent, which puts to shame Kidman’s decidedly Australian version of an accent.

Writer and director Anthony Minghella, whose previous successes have earned him three Oscar nominations (two for The English Patient and one for The Talented Mr. Ripley ), tries his hand at this Civil War-based version of Homer’s The Odyssey. As we watch the wilting wife-to-be waits wistfully at home, Inman slowly makes his way home after a war injury puts him in the infirmary, from which he goes AWOL. Along the way, he finds the road difficult, running into Southern sympathizers who capture him, beat him, search for him, and from whom he escapes on several occasions.

He meets many varied and interesting people, each giving the two-dimensional performance required to make the story interesting. Guest actors like Philip Seymour Hoffman, Natalie Portman, Giovanni Ribisi and Jena Malone are just a few of the people he comes into contact with.

The film’s central purpose is as a romantic tragedy in the vein of Shakespeare. It’s a depressing, violent and simplistic film that encourages the romantic to dream while causing others to doze. The film touches on many traditional storytelling elements but fails to capture the full breadth of its story, partially due to Kidman’s inability to match Vivien Leigh superb performance in Gone with the Wind which the character is quite obviously based on.

Cold Mountain is not a success by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a woefully underdone film that lacks any imagination. Every seen is drawn from an existing literary source. The film is adapted from the Charles Frazier book but it feels like something that we’ve seen dozens of times and are so intimately familiar with that it becomes painful to watch. Audiences may leave the theater wondering why they watched such an obvious and pedestrian film but others will walk out singing the praises of this often charming but underwhelming exercise in unexceptional filmmaking.

Review Written

March 30, 2004