Overall Rating
  Awesome: 18.37%
Worth A Look: 39.29%
Average: 14.29%
Pretty Bad: 14.8%
Total Crap: 13.27%
13 reviews, 118 user ratings
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| Cold Mountain |
by Erik Childress
"The Only Button On Minghella's DVD Player Should Be STOP!"
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When it was possible to shut out Nicole Kidman’s narration of her feelings towards the lost Confederate soldier she barely knew, I heard the voice of Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes. You’ll recall in one episode how she was dragged kicking and screaming (twice) to the epic love poem, The English Patient, that audiences and Oscar embraced cause they believed they should. “Just tell your STUPID story about the STUPID desert and die already. Die. DIE,” she screamed! Director Anthony Minghella is at it again with a long, boorish, passionless epic romance that manages to be more ass-numbing than his Oscar winner.Minghella, who in his long-winded tales of love has the storytelling prowess of a narcoleptic Ulysses teacher, should make the small effort of staying away from the flashbacks. For over a half-hour, we’re inundated with them so we can grasp the star-crossed nature of two people who barely know each other in a place surprisingly not named for the chilly emotional state of its inhabitants. So frequent are the jumps in time that after 20 minutes the film has to remind us where we are and what year we’re in.
Ada Monroe (Nicole Kidman) has moved to Cold Mountain, North Carolina with her reverend father (Donald Sutherland). Immediately privy to the stares of soon-to-be Confederate soldier, J.P. Inman (Jude Law), she makes the first gesture with her predisposed female duty of serving. They share a second conversation, then a third where Inman gets up the nerve to plant one on her. She gives him a picture and he’s off to fight.
A bloody massacre disillusions Inman to war (as would it anyone) and when he suffers a near-fatal wound, he decides he’s had enough and goes AWOL so he can get back to Ada. Love of his life or not, if your choice is fighting for the South in the civil war or trekking on foot to get some from Nicole Kidman, the million-dollar wound takes on a whole new light.
So as Inman does his Odysseus thing to be the man who walked a thousand miles to fall down at Ada’s door, Ada evolves into Scarlett O’Hara after her father dies with the help of local girl, Ruby (Renee Zellweger). This brash, pouty gal is going to show the prim-and-proper book reader how to tend to her farm, establishing dominance early by snapping the head off a rooster. A non-too-subtle feminist metaphor if there ever was one. I’m not even going to get into the blind man with the hot nuts.
With a device utilized from Easy Rider to Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Inman will meet lots of colorful characters along the way, each with something to say and possibly for him to learn from. There’s a joyfully unashamed Commandment-breaking preacher (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a man with a homestyle brothel full of siren-ish sisters (Giovanni Ribisi) and a single mom with a sick newborn (Natalie Portman). Each of them pose the potential for interesting characters, but they are only parts of a chapter play to serve a couple scenes before Inman rides his lawnmower on to his next pee-wee adventure.
Meanwhile the crack Cold Mountain squad of deserter-busters is wrecking murderous havoc on the townspeople with all the subtlety of Monty Python’s “how not to be seen” sketch. (And here is the neighbor who told us where they were. BANG!) The leader (Ray Winstone) had a wanton stake in Ada’s farm and wanton even more to put his own stake into Ada, encapsulated in 5-second Butthead moments of “uh, hey baby.” Their villainous ways become increasingly more comical as they just seem prepared to knock-off anyone sitting around a campfire. Thank God they have the acrobatic albino (Charlie Hunnam) since you need one of those in every posse.
Kidman’s Ada, whose transformation into steadfast independence makes her a candidate for the cover of Modern Frontierswoman (just look at that black ensemble and hat to die for), admits she finds it hard to smile (as Inman’s picture would indicate.) Such will be the case for audiences looking to embrace the central relationship of her and Inman, who as played by Law is an even more stone-faced apparatus. The lack of time spent between them before separation does nothing to suggest pure love as it were and the zero chemistry between the actors dampens the passion level to the top of Old Smokey where, at the very least, they should be melting the snow if not causing a volcano.
Of all the film’s central performances, only Zellweger shines any ray of life with her unfaltering no-nonsense work-as-life ethic. She seems in line for her third straight nomination (and may just win the supporting category), although she should look for alternative methods to looking pouty then just crunching her nose each time. Of the other supporting turns, Hoffman provides some necessary relief as the loutish man of God and Portman reminds her Amidala-detractors of what a fine actress she truly is.The English Patient suffered mostly with me thanks to a main character who was such a cold, bitter jackass that it was impossible to sympathize with his adulterous behavior in the name of love. At least the relationship between Juliette Binoche’s nurse and the Sikh officer had traces of the romance we expect from old-school epics where cynicism was displaced by notions of fairy-tale happiness even in the grimmest of circumstances. Cold Mountain lives up to its name with a blanket of unintended silliness and vacuous, undeveloped leads which is almost unfathomable and certainly unforgivable with 155 minutes to overcome. I could go on for days like Inman, but I don’t think anyone could say it better than Elaine Benes.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=8421&reviewer=198
originally posted: 12/25/03 17:02:01
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This film is available for download or online viewing at CinemaNow.com For more in the CinemaNow.com series, click here.
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USA
25-Dec-2003 (R)
DVD: 29-Jun-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
01-Jan-2004
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