It is always open season on period movies for hunters of realism and authenticity, and beautiful women are always the allegedly anachronistic targets. Zellweger as reasons rather than excuses not to like the film. I liked the entire cast of Cold Mountain, and I’ve been amused by some of the attacks on the performances of Ms. Minghella loses his footing as a storyteller, though he directs magnificently a villain’s last line, “My big advantage is that I have the confidence of youth”-a poignantly hubristic piece of dialogue worthy of William Shakespeare’s Hotspur in Henry IV. Inman and Ada do come together briefly, but it’s precisely at this point that Mr. But it goes on to a flowery coda that somehow dilutes the harsh realism of much that has preceded it. The film should end with the Wild West gunfight in which Inman saves Ada and Ruby from Teague’s ruffians. Among the other players are Philip Seymour Hoffman as the defrocked and adulterous Reverend Veasey Brendan Gleeson as Ruby’s errant troubadour father, Stobrod Thewes, whom Ruby has never forgiven for abandoning his family and Kathy Baker as Sally Swanger, who is rescued by Ada and Ruby after her husband and children have been slaughtered by Teague and his wild bunch. Especially memorable is the sublime Eileen Atkins as Maddy, a hardscrabble Samaritan who makes slitting a goat’s throat for food seem like an act of infinite mercy, and also Natalie Portman as a fearless but defenseless mother striving to save her baby’s life, even as she is being sexually menaced by marauders. This picaresque format gives the film an episodic quality, intensified by the alternation of Inman’s travails with scenes of Ada’s Penelope-like courtship ordeal with Teague, Ray Winstone’s brutal ex-landowner who is using the war as a cover for his private depredations as a uniformed hunter of deserters.Įach of the episodes (or digressions, if you will) at both ends of the quest introduces a superlative new scene-stealing acting talent or two, albeit at the expense of the narrative flow. Along the way, he meets a series of bizarre eccentrics and outcasts, both benign and malignant. In this very literary adaptation of an already purplish novel, Inman evolves into an Odyssean wanderer as he confronts one life-threatening challenge after another. Meanwhile-and there are more than a few meanwhiles in this story-the hitherto sheltered Ada is forced to deal with the sudden death of her father, and the almost magical liberation and disappearance of her black slaves, which leaves her farm in a perilous state of neglect and disrepair until Renée Zellweger’s feisty, sassy Ruby Thewes storms onto Ada’s farm seeking work as an all-purpose laborer, thus giving the film and the farm a needed jolt of energy to shake up Ada’s delicate and Chekhovian refinement. As it turns out, most of Inman’s screen time is that of an increasingly desperate deserter obsessed with returning to his love in Cold Mountain. This and a period tin-type of his beloved are all that Inman can carry into the years of blood and gore to sustain his ardor. An unusually restrained romance unfolds-until, that is, the day Inman is about to leave to fight the Yankees and the two lovers embrace with an unexpectedly passionate this-is-for-always kiss. Ada and Inman exchange less-than-smoldering glances, albeit at a great distance. Jude Law’s Inman, already glimpsed in the Petersburg trenches as his Confederate comrades are blown to bits, is shown working in more pastoral surroundings, building the church when the eventual love of his life, Nicole Kidman’s Ada Monroe, arrives in town on a horse-drawn buggy with her minister father, Reverend Monroe (Donald Sutherland). After more than adequately demonstrating that war is hell-flying bodies and severed limbs emphasize the point-the film flashes back to the antebellum Cold Mountain, N.C. At the outset, we witness the prolonged spectacle, à la Saving Private Ryan (1998), of the sickeningly explosive battle of the Petersburg Crater in Virginia in July of 1864. There is no nonsense about following Ashley Wilkes to the various battlefields, nor fixating on Rhett Butler’s disreputable assignations.īy contrast, Cold Mountain leads the narration down a bloody garden path. Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara through her experiences in Tara and Atlanta before, during and after the Civil War. From the first shot of Vivien Leigh’s gleaming green eyes, captured for the first time in Technicolor, to the concluding Max Steiner crescendo on her return to Tara, GWTW single-mindedly follows Ms. Indeed, the split focus on wildly and widely separated lovers makes Cold Mountain seem much longer at 155 minutes than Gone with the Wind did at 222 minutes back in 1939. Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain, from his own screenplay, based on the novel by Charles Frazier, winds down as a film of many excellences undermined by a flawed narrative.
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