If you already know that war is hell, then you can safely give COLD MOUNTAIN, based on the critically acclaimed novel of the same name by Charles Frazier, a miss and save that almost three hours of your life for something else. If for a reason unfathomable by me you need the lesson driven home for the first time or for the gazillionth, there are supporting performances that save this film from being another entirely ponderous exercise in star power fizzling and prestige filmmaking gone pretentious.
The stars are Nicole Kidman and Jude Law, a beautiful pair of human beings playing a beautiful pair of sweethearts separated by the Civil War yet bound together by a great passion. That they are southerners lets us know that theirs will not be an easy lot. She is Ada, the pampered daughter of a minister recently relocated from the refinements of Charleston to a farm in the rural splendor of Cold Mountain. He is Inman, the orphaned carpenter who catches her eye, captures her heart, and then marches off to war leaving her only a photograph of himself and the memories of the half-dozen words that theyve spoken to each other. Theyre both, it seems, a little shy. Their story is told in flashback. Inman, having deserted the cause he no longer believes in, recalls their courtship as he makes his way back to her. Ada, herself now an orphan schooled to be a scholar, not the farmer that her new situation demands, re-invents herself by day while writing letters to her lover at night recalling their past and musing on their future.
Things start with a bang. That would be Inmans last battle, an orgy of blood, gore, and smoke that is like a thunderclap as clothes are blown off by explosions and the wounded drown in mud, trampled underfoot as the battle rages and chaos reigns. And then settles into a reverent quiet broken only by bouts of gunplay. Writer/directorAnthony Minghellas work fails as an epic as it sags under the weight of its own lofty ambitions as it grapples with issues of life and death. Instead of a series of profound meditations on those topics, there are a series of tableaux wherein a variety of humans and animals meets or barely escape gruesome extinction. The effect is less a danse macabre designed to provide a moral or philosophical lesson, as a series of bloodlettings in the manner of Grand Guignol, one piled on another until the audience becomes so inured to the slaughter that it no longer has much of an impact much less that intended by the filmmaker.
The fizzle I mentioned before lies with a hero and especially a heroine that fail to engage us emotionally. Kidman gives a one-note performance consisting of trying to get the southern accent right. It is as though she is so focused on that task, which she occasionally gets right, that there is no energy to project any kind of emotion. The expression never changes, the tone of voice varies only when a shout is dictated by the script. The sole proof of Adas growth as a character and newfound maturity is the sunburn coloring Kidmans face. Law fares a bit better, despite being hobbled with a part that requires him to spend much of his time exhausted or wounded, or both. He is like a ghost, dumbstruck before the war by Adas beauty, and also later on the long road home, running from the confederate army that wants him back and finding refuge in the homes of those who take him in for a variety of reasons in a countryside given over to anarchy and terrorism by both armies. Through it all, Law does project a dogged, if somewhat somnambulant, determination to get back to his lady love.
It is the supporting players who make this film interesting. Topping the list is Renee Zellweger as Ruby, the no-nonsense, take-charge country girl who shows up at Adas farm and metaphorically kicks her in the pants to get her farm running again. She also delivers a swift kick to the film with a gloriously lively performance that takes over the screen with its kinetic energy and palpable warmth. Her Ruby is bursting with buoyancy that can barely be contained even in her sturdy frame, bustling through the life, laying out winter gardens, building fences and generally creating order out of chaos while never backing down from any challenge the war or nature throws her way. Even the home guard abusing the martial law in Cold Mountain by torturing the locals, while its commander lusts none too subtly for Ada. The cast of characters Inman encounters on his odyssey are almost as engaging. There are backwoods sirens, a crone who dispenses healing, and dispatches a goat with equal skill, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as a lascivious preacher with flexible principles and enough vanity to justify his wandering from the straight and narrow. Most astonishing is Natalie Portman, the leaden heroine of the benighted Star Wars prequel trilogy. Here she is a confederate widow left to fend for herself and her baby in a tiny cabin with winter coming on and the Yankees ravaging the countryside. Mad with grief and worry, Portmans few minutes on screen are some of the most powerful of the film, not for cheap histrionics, which she avoids, but rather for the heartbreaking quiet to which her hopeless situation has driven her.
Handsomely mounted, but hollow at the core, COLD MOUNTAINs reach far, far exceeds its grasp. And the attention span of its potential audience.
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