Movie Review: Cold Mountain

I saw Cold Mountain this week on DVD. The film garnered multiple Oscar nominations, including acting noms for Renée Zellwegger and Jude Law. It was directed by Anthony Minghella, who also gave us the highly overrated and critically adored English Patient. His latest work continues in the vein of English Patient.

The film is really comprised of two stories that are slightly interconnected. Inman (Law) is a Southern commoner from Cold Mountain, North Carolina who enthusiastically enlists in the Confederate Army when the Civil War breaks out. Shortly before the war, Ada (Nicole Kidman) and her reverend father (Donald Sutherland) arrive in Cold Mountain. Ada and Inman meet and exchange a few words. That's the backstory. The bulk of the film takes place in the summer and winter of 1864, when the South is crumbling. After being injured in the great crater fiasco at Petersburg (the Union army digs a tunnel under the Confederate fortifications, plants a lot of explosives, blows a huge hole in the Confederate lines, and then promptly charges into the crater where they are easily defeated), Inman deserts the army and begins to walk back to Cold Mountain. He deserts because Ada wrote a letter 6-8 months prior asking him to. As he journeys home, he encounters a series of strange characters you will only find in movies, all the while trying to avoid the Home Guard, whose job is to find deserters and drag them back to the war. Meanwhile, Ada's father has died and the southern belle is forced to try to provide for herself. Ruby (Zellwegger), a tomboy, arrives to help, and together they put the farm back in order.

Like English Patient, Cold Mountain is a gorgeous film. But beautiful photography does not make a film. The story does, and the story fails miserably here. Inman's journey is reasonably interesting, but the characters he meets are unrealistic and have no connection. His story is a series of vignettes with quirky characters and nothing to connect them. Ada's story is uninteresting. Sheltered debutante has to learn the realities of life. OK. Seen it. What do we learn of Ada as a character? She's gorgeous (she is Nicole Kidman, after all). She's ....uh.... gorgeous. She ....uh.... looks good. She ....uh.... looks good playing a piano. There is nothing interesting about her. Ruby brightens the scene tremendously after she appears.

What is supposed to hold the story together is the love between Ada and Inman, a love that drives him to risk his life to get back to her, and causes her to ....uh..... look good waiting for him. This relationship is a joke, only to be found in romantic movies. As Ada herself admits, they've exchanged perhaps a dozen words in their lives. In the years of war and separation, Inman has read 3 letters from her (though she claims to have written more than 100) and has written precisely 0 back. Sure, I can believe that is the foundation of a meaningful, long-term, long-distance relationship! When they bump into one another out in the woods one day, they immediately pledge themselves to each other as a means of justifying their romp in bed.

Come on. Writing has gotten very lazy in film, and writing about relationships is even worse. Why develop characters and interactions when you can get the leading lady to drop her drawers for an extended nude scene? Sex means love, right? If they are having sex, they must be in love, because only people madly in love would ever dream of exchanging fluids, right? Who cares what kind of person she is, look at the butt! OK, so there is something interesting about Ada.

Anyway, the acting is reasonably good, especially from Zellwegger and Law. Renée is becoming quite the Meryl Streep, securing Oscar nominations three years in a row. She finally won for this performance. Given that she was the best part of the film, and the one character to watch with anything approaching interest, I can understand.