Cold Mountain Review

by Mark R. Leeper (markrleeper AT yahoo DOT com)
January 7th, 2004

COLD MOUNTAIN
    (a film review by Mark R. Leeper)

    CAPSULE: Nicole Kidman and Jude Law play two lovers separated by the Civil War and struggling to be
    reunited. Kidman is a woman not unlike Scarlett
    O'Hara who must go from being a useless peacetime
    ornament to become a strong and self-sufficient
    survivor. This could have been a powerful war
    story, but under the surface it is contrived and
    unconvincing and the performances are uninvolving.
    Most of the compelling storytelling is in the first reel. Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10

COLD MOUNTAIN is written and directed by Anthony Minghella (THE ENGLISH PATIENT, THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY) based on the novel by Charles Frazier. This is a story about cruelty and compassion in the South during the last year of the American Civil War. All of the cruelty seems to come from men and all of the compassion seems to be from women. The main character, played by Jude Law, is an exception, but the men around him from clergy to military seem a worthless group of people. Minghella shows us a world full of evil men and the women who are their innocent victims but who try to help each other. Nichole Kidman plays Ada, the daughter of a slave-holding minister in North Carolina. She was one of the rare Southern women who had been reticent to see the war come. With the war she loses Inman (Law) to the Confederate Army. Inman is the man she loves and would have married if the war had not interrupted.

The film opens with The Battle of the Crater, a particularly horrendous clash which took place at Petersburg, Virginia. The battle, I am told, was not in the original novel, but it is a highly dramatic event and nobody else had filmed it. Inman is injured in the fighting and is hospitalized. He deserts and begins a long and perilous odyssey to return home to Cold Mountain, North Carolina. But the story really centers on Ada, who loses her father and for a while has to run her farm by herself. This is a task for which she has no training, and she makes a proper mess of it. A neighbor knows of a certain unrefined but intelligent woman who needs a place to work. The woman is Ruby (Renee Zellweger). Ada and Ruby set about making the farm work. Ruby is coarse but she understands what is necessary to do to get food from a farm. Everything she says is rough but pure common sense. However, it will take more than common sense and hard work to keep two women alive in these dangerous last months of the Civil War. The focus moves back and forth from Inman's adventures to Ada's. Not very originally, Ada's main problems come from a lecherous Home Guard commander, for whom it would be both a duty and a pleasure to kill Inman, his rival for Ada. Inman meanwhile faces Confederate troops who want to hang him and various dangers on the road.

It is a long haul to bring these two people back together, and the audience is likely not to invest too much emotion in their reunion. Neither Kidman nor Law seems to have much screen presence beyond good looks to make us really care if they get back together or not. In flashbacks we see that Ada could manipulate Inman to clear a field, but her power over him does not appear to get much ardor from him on-screen. One has cause to wonder if Ada is in poverty so close to starvation, why is it that her clothes are so well tailored and fit her so well? Civil War fashions were apparently far more attractive that we had been led to believe. Brendan Gleeson does a nice turn as Ruby's rascal of a father. Donald Sutherland plays Ada's father who is as good a man as one finds in the South, but it is still left to Ada to free his slaves. Philip Seymour Hoffman is another type of scoundrel, but is only passably believable as a man of the Civil War period. Also present is Natalie Portman, as one more woman who suffers for what the men are doing. That is a fairly impressive cast, but the film has trouble really clicking.

To capture the unspoiled feel of the forests of the South during the Civil War, and also as an economy measure, the film was shot in the woods of Transylvania, Romania (the area erroneously thought to be a particular center of vampire legends). I had high hopes for this film, but it really is a well-made B-film and not a great epic of Civil War times. I rate COLD MOUNTAIN a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 6/10.

Mark R. Leeper
[email protected]
Copyright 2004 Mark R. Leeper

More on 'Cold Mountain'...


Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.