Cold Mountain


by Shari L. Rosenblum

Cold Mountain, adapted from the novel by Charles Frazier, is a sweeping Minghellan epic about war's destruction, the heroism of the soldier turned (see, also, The English Patient ) and love's salvation. Making do with mostly Brits, Irish, and Australians (Americans hard to come by, apparently), it pulls out all the stops -- lovers are separated, families destroyed, children lost -- and seems to beg us for our tears even as it pretends to higher thought and deeper meaning.

And pretense, it is, most unavoidably, for it is ultimately -- and proximately -- unmoving. Its war is bloody, but vague, as if an irrelevant point of departure, a host of clichés to set the movement. Its hero (Jude Law) is a man of silent morality from a different era, wide-eyed, soft-hearted and out of place. Its heroine (Nicole Kidman) is an icon of faux delicacy in indelicate times. And the love between them is trite and predictable, overwritten and overwrought knight gallantry -- the kind that has rarely been imagined outside of medieval romance and Minghella films. Intended as an Odyssey of the Civil War -- (Law plays "Inman" (get it?) as homage to Odysseus's "No man" pseudonym as well as to philosophy's everyman) -- the warrior's journey home to his beloved seems forced and unnatural, and the oh-so-important messaging unravels quite as regularly as Penelope's funeral shroud.

Jude Law is a beautiful man, but there is nothing inspiring in his portrayal of Inman, a man we've seen motivated only by the promise of love -- as much to clear a field as desert his comrades in arms. There is no idea in him of land or community, of battle's righteousness or wrongs -- no hint of the warrior sustained by war's goddess for the scars he has suffered. No hint of brotherhood or battle-weariness in his emotions. Inman is a half-man. A romance hero fleshed out just enough to perform the practiced strokes of cinematic seduction in Frazier/Minghella's wooing of a willing audience. (The novel gives him thoughts aplenty, but they are no more intellectually or morally compelling than the self-impressed meanderings of any would-be litterateur, and would not have been preferable here, all the same.)

Nicole Kidman is a beautiful woman, but there is nothing convincing in her portrayal of Ada, a woman we've seen motivated by nothing at all -- save the pat daughterly devotion she feels toward her dad (Donald Sutherland, in one of his now standard dad performances) and the painted-on spark in her eye for Inman. As the men march away from her, the film has her move from refined to ravaged in a matter of moments -- hair unkempt, clothes bedraggled, behavior out of character with the character we've met -- and Kidman's natural haughtiness and emotive inflexibility make the transition seem irksome and imposed. Her performance is less an acting feat than a series of poses punctuated with contrivances that even a prosthetic nose could not disguise.

On his travels home to Ada, the war and his fellows behind him,
Inman takes shelter among beasts and men, temptresses and
healers, each an ostensible insight into the pitfalls of human nature, none particularly interesting or insightful. Least believable is the least bearable creature on the screen -- the lecherous preacher with the tragic deeds of slave-impregnation and attempted murder, and the comic flaw of constipation (a gag seemingly borrowed from a left over Farrelly brothers script). Played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, born for the role in all its flabby excess, the character is off-putting and actively disengaging. If the film had been working until then, it would have stopped there dead. Unfortunately, though, it goes on to a downed cow in the water (one of Frazier's revelatory exhilarations in animal cruelty), a slacker hillbilly played by Giovanni Ribisi, a harem of dirty Circes, a semi-sweet widow (Natalie Portman, whose beauty and sensitivity almost save the film), and an old mystic (Eileen Atkins) who calmly kills and bleeds a trusting goat (another of Frazier's sadistic revelations). Any hint of the poetic lost now, and the stomach sourly turned, the film nevertheless follows through its petty paces.

Meanwhile, back on the homefront, Ada is going through a journey of her own, fighting off suitors and the Home Guard (two mints in one) and learning to be self-sufficient. In this, she is led and directed by Renée Zellwegger as a rural tomboy of sorts, modeled, one can only guess, from old Hee-Haw episodes -- and then classed downward. Named Ruby Thewes (pronounced as if short for Ruby Tuesday), her accent, her comportment, her every move is so ludicrously hammed up that I kept looking in the background for Alan Funt or Ashton Kutcher. Painfully unsympathetic in nature, she, too, has a penchant for animal insensitivity, tearing off a rooster's head as if that's simply what grown-ups do. (Minghella actually softened Frazier's delectation in animal bloodletting, but the film still reeks of humanistic hypocrisy -- if the characters are escaping man's brutality toward men, why luxuriate in their brutality toward other living beings?). Utterly unlikable in her stylings, and unbelievable as a character, Zellwegger's Ruby Thewes has been extolled by many. As for me, I'd mark this turn of hers as one of the worst performances by a talented actor that I've ever seen on screen.

And still the film goes on. And on. And on. Bright moments pass. Brendan Gleeson, Jack White, Natalie Portman . . . but they are fleeting, and the film quickly falls back each time to heightened melodrama, cheap romantic mysticism, and weighty self-importance.

Other viewers seem more inclined to Minghella-told tales than I, more willing to believe in his English Patient / Truly, Madly, Deeply romanticism than I can fathom. But he is a talented director, his settings are stunning, and he knows how to set a mood. So I wanted, wanted truly, to believe in this well-worn tale of love and survival. But it was not to be.

Cold Mountain is a beautiful film, but there is nothing in it to warm the heart or stir the mind, and nothing outside of its production values to lift it above a pedestrian retelling of a tale better told a million times before. In the end, what we get is faux irony (how ironic is it if it's announced early on, really?), a romantic climax reminiscent of a barn wedding between Brock and Jill in the early years of The Young and the Restless, and what is perhaps the most clichéd, and most predictable romance / telenovela emblem of love's rising above it all and moving on. The best that can be said of it is that it entertains intermittently, and softens momentarily. But even to the extent it manages to lift us up, it lets us down without warning -- a graceless, rambling, disappointment that makes us long for what might have been.

©2003 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene