Cold Mountain Review

by Karina Montgomery (karina AT cinerina DOT com)
December 29th, 2003

Cold Mountain

Matinee

I fully admit, I probably would not have seen this movie at all if I had noticed/remembered that it was an Anthony Minghella film. I find his filmmaking ponderous and self-aggrandizing, and I can't even explain why. Some of Cold Mountain had the feel that I associate with him - it's about 25 minutes too long, and I always feel as though something very important was still cut out of th e film. However, Cold Mountain has a level of artistry and heart that I would normally not give Mr. Minghella credit for. I will lay the credit partially with the source material, Charles Frazier's novel of the same name.

I will say one thing: Nicole Kidman is so porcelain, so ethereal in her beauty(and Jude Law isn't exactly Quasimodo either) that it was actually extremely distracting for the first half of this very long movie. Minghella likes his heroines to be chilly and aloof (Kristen Scott Thomas in the English Patient, Gwyneth Paltrow in Talented Mr. Ripley) but Cold Mountain and the ravages of the Civil War are inhospitable enough that even an ice goddess like Nicole Kidman looks like a warm stove in that milieu.

Ravages indeed. The Seige of Petersburg is so incredibly personal, so up close, so vital, so wet - it's like the Normandy beach scene in Saving Private Ryan, if no one was allowed to use a gun. Brrrr! Cold Mountain indeed. Not since Gone With The Wind have we been treated to such a sense of the devastation wrought upon the South by the war, but without the fiddle dee dee of gentility to soften the blow.

The music is fantastic, the cinematography beautiful. The rolling pristine hills of Romania serving as Antebellum North Carolina will take your breath away. No wonder these boys thought they would win. God had clearly favored their people with this glorious land. But of course, the real story is tragic, agonizing, difficult - deprivation warring with pride, terror and desperate love born of nothing more than hope. It's all very epic, and considering what they are going through, we can forgive them all their romantic ideals. Their pre-war scenes together are clotted with nonsensical dialogue, but after they part the words improve. The first hour and a half at least feel more like a poem than a story, meandering around through story lines and imagery. Reflections abound in the film, and the more you notice them, the more interesting the poem gets.

Enter tomboy Renee Zellweger, as unglamorous and hale and hearty a laborer as you never saw her before, drawling happily through her role as part comic relief, part deus ex machina, part boon companion. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Natalie Portman, and the goat lady (whose name I was unable to glean from the credits) contribute short but fascinating character studies in our leads' quest to attain life again after this devastating conflict.

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These reviews (c) 2003 Karina Montgomery. Please feel free to forward but credit the reviewer in the text. Thanks. You can check out previous reviews at:
http://www.cinerina.com and http://ofcs.rottentomatoes.com - the Online Film Critics Society http://www.hsbr.net/reviews/karina/listing.hsbr - Hollywood Stock Exchange Brokerage Resource

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