Cold Mountain

Cold Mountain is the first film in three years from director Anthony Minghella, the man who brought us The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley, two films that while earning high praises, have also garnered some widespread derision in the arena of Pop Culture.  After all, not many movies can claim to be the butt of an entire episode of “Seinfeld,” as The English Patient has.  I personally loved that movie, and thought Ripley deserved much more attention than it received.  However, with this most recent effort from Minghella, I feel as though the Pop Culture Universe has somehow inverted on me, as I find myself wondering what I’m missing in this film that everyone else seems to love, even before they’ve seen it.

The talk about this movie has been all across the media this past fall, and this was supposed to be the big one, folks.  This is the one that all the middle-aged women across America sat around the dinner table at Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays telling their husbands they couldn’t wait to go see.  This is the one that all of the movie press was touting as the shoo-in for Best Picture before the TV spots had even run.  Nicole Kidman is going to have another shot at Best Actress, they say.  Jude Law will step into the same league with Hanks and Pitt and Farrell with this one, they say.  Well, I, for one, am not so sure.  

Cold Mountain becomes another one of those movies that isn’t bad at all, but I can’t bring myself to say that it’s real good, either.  All of the ingredients are here for an epic love story told against the backdrop of events that are larger than life like Doctor Zhivago or Titanic, but something doesn’t click here.  We’re asked to accept that Ada Monroe (Kidman) comes with her ailing father (Donald Sutherland) to the mountains of North Carolina from Charleston in the days just before the Civil War and meets Inman (Law), an uneducated laboring chap.  Their eyes meet and in that instant their love is cemented.  That much really doesn’t bother me, as I imagine that life was a whole lot less complicated in that time (as were the people, I suppose), and folks probably spent a heck of a lot less time delving into their compatibility than we do in this day and age.  You’re pretty/handsome and you’re available, so you’ll probably do; such was probably the mentality of mating back in those days.  So as far as I’m concerned, let’s get on with the love story.

Inman enlists in the Confederate Army at the outset of the war and three years later, finds himself at the siege of Petersburg, narrowly surviving the Battle of the Crater.  All the while he pines away for Ada.  As we learn through flashbacks and flash-forwards, Inman and Ada had just begun their courtship when the war took Inman away.  While recuperating from his wounds, Inman deserts a hospital somewhere along the South Carolina coast and begins hiking north, towards his home on Cold Mountain.  All the while, Ada’s father has died, leaving her ill-prepared to fend for herself, reared in Charleston high society as she was. 

The film spends most of its second act as a series of episodes where Inman and Ada separately come across several colorful characters; some are merely poor lost souls, some have evil intent, some are merely trying to survive the war, but none of whom seem to serve any purpose but to keep the two lovers apart.  The events to which these cads and saps subject our poor lovers don’t really stretch the borders of my believability, and I can even accept that such awful things happened on the home front of the Confederacy during the Civil War.  However, while the cameos of such folk as Philip Seymour Hoffman, Giovanni Ribisi and Natalie Portman are interesting, I never could see all of these incidents stringing together as an entire narrative, nor see them as anything more than random happenstance.  It felt more like episodes of a television mini-series.

The movie is wonderfully made, though.  The actors, especially the two leads and Renee’ Zellweger as the crusty country lass who saves Ada from starvation, all do very well with what they’re given to do.  The depiction of the Battle of the Crater is almost worth the eight bucks admission price.  Minghella recreates this period of history with total believability, perhaps with the exception of the perfect teeth in the mouths of everyone, but I guess I expect too much.

Something in Minghella’s screenplay failed to tie all of these happenings together in a way I could maintain a steady emotional involvement in Ada and Inman’s plight.  The conclusion felt as though it should have come an hour earlier, but my screenwriting abilities are not so advanced that I could suggest how better to bridge the lovers’ meeting and their reunion.  This flick will probably get its Best Picture nomination, along with nominations for the two leads, Zellweger and several other technical categories, and all will probably be well-deserved, except for the Best Picture nod.  I just hope that Minghella’s screenplay won’t be among the nominees.

Larry Smoak
December 30, 2003

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