Cold Mountain

Synopsis: Girl briefly meets boy, girl loses boy for a few years. Each has their own internal and external battles to fight. They truly, truly love each other, but will they ever meet again? Meanwhile, girl meets girl and has some fun.

Cold Mountain is based on an award-winning novel by Charles Frazier. The film is set in 1864 during the American Civil War, and is about Confederate soldier, Inman (Jude Law), and the woman he loves - a preacher’s daughter, Ada Monroe (Nicole Kidman). After a brief flirtation and deep and meaningful kiss, Inman leaves Cold Mountain to fight the Yankees and Ada is left to fend for herself after her father (Donald Sutherland) dies. After three years of battle, Inman ends up in hospital seriously wounded and he has enough of the stupidity of war and deserts the Army to walk back home to her. Meanwhile, farm hand Ruby (Renée Zellweger), turns up to helps Ada run the farm, saving her from starvation and ruin. The villain of the piece, leader of the town’s Home Guard, Teague (Ray Winstone), fancies Ada for himself. He also busies himself hunting down and killing deserters and their protectors, and confiscating their property in the name of duty.

Cold Mountain is a romance and a war story. However, it is a sanitised war story, without the flourishes of bloody realism to which we have grown accustomed and is more of a backdrop to the romance which provides the main theme. The love story component is simple, certainly not of the scale and complexity of that great Southern love/war story, Gone With the Wind (1939).

The film doesn’t really establish its main claim - that true love can survive all odds. This point is supposedly taken care of by the frequent comments along the lines of ‘we’ve had so little time together, do we really love each other? Yes, yes, we do’. The love between Inman and Ada is believable, but not convincing and palpable enough as a great love story. There’s an emotional distance between the two protagonists, reminiscent of Minghella’s other film, The English Patient (1996) which also didn’t quite click emotionally.

You could take the view that a soldier will grasp at anything to survive a war, and a woman will think she loves someone if he’s not around to spoil the dream. This projection theory is supported by an earlier encounter when it looks like they’re going to argue, but they decide it is better to just stand quietly together. All the better to project ‘love’ onto an unknown desired object.

Thankfully, Cold Mountain is also a road movie. Inman has adventures and meets ‘interesting’ characters along the way, all looking for supporting best actor/actress nominations. Natalie Portman as a young war widow with a baby is particularly poignant in her desire for human contact with a male. It is this level of acting that the film needed from Kidman; maybe Portman should’ve played Ada, the role she originally auditioned for. However, Kidman does look absolutely fabulous in every scene. Her performance is reasonable, but her acting isn’t as good as her costumes, hair and make-up. Brendan Gleeson is another talented actor and he does a great job as Ruby’s reformed father. Much has been made of Zellweger’s ‘feisty’ performance. She is wonderful but hasn’t overcome her habit of relentlessly pouting and squinting her way through a film. There is just a hint of a romantic liaison between Ruby and Ada but this is largely glossed over.

Overall if thee performances are impressive, the casting is ungainly, with Gleeson, Winstone, Portman,  Law and Kidman, let alone Philip Seymour Hoffman, hardly suited to the story thereby creating an estranging effect probably compounded by the fact that the film was shot in Romania. No doubt this reflects British director Minghella's intention to give us a historical romance not a history lesson a là Glory (1989) but the conflict between fact and fiction tends to pull his film apart.

Cold Mountain never looks less than wonderful thanks to John Seale's cinematography but the overall lack of dramatic engagement and some occasional glib moments such as Gleeson's and Kathy Baker's characters' hasty recoveries makes it feel overlong. 

FYI: Zellweger won a Best Supporting Female Oscar.

 

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