Cold Mountain is an often-beautiful movie about always-beautiful people who had the misfortune of falling in love during the ugliest chapter of American history.
The movie opens with The Battle of the Crater, an actual Civil War battle in Petersburg, Va. Director Anthony Minghella captures this battle in a harrowing montage of mud and blood, surely the most intense screen battle sequence since Saving Private Ryan.
One of the soldiers in this battle is W.P. Inman, played by the chameleon-like Jude Law, who carries with him a tin photo of southern belle Ada Monroe. Ada (Nicole Kidman) is a pampered reverend's daughter with whom Inman shared a few intimate moments before the outbreak of war in the town of Cold Mountain, Va.
The movie follows two lines of action. In one, Ada gradually collapses into depression as her ranch deteriorates. Her only motivation becomes reconnecting with Inman, which she attempts to do by writing letters urging him to return and rescue her from her own dormancy. Before Inman has the chance to do so, however, someone else does. Renée Zellweger shows up as Ruby Thewes, jumpstarting Ada's dilapidated ranch (and the movie) with the plucky verve of a Trading Spaces host. Her delightfully electric performance will almost certainly win her a deserved Best Supporting Actress Oscar.
Meanwhile, the severely wounded Inman receives Ada's letter while lying in a hospital bed and sets off on foot for the long journey home. Along the way, he encounters many obstacles, as well as many celebrity cameos, including Philip Seymour Hoffman and Natalie Portman. Casting well-known actors in small parts tends to divert the viewer's attention from the narrative, but the performers immerse themselves so completely into their roles that their star personae quickly dissolve, and they become minor characters of an atypically compelling nature.
Also compelling is the artistic sublimity of the film. Minghella, director of The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley, has once again assembled creative technicians of intimidating dexterity. This includes the memorable costumes, the refreshingly CGI-less set design and the music, featuring everyone from Jack White to Johann Sebastian Bach. Kudos, most of all, to cinematographer John Seale, who has all but sealed an Oscar with the visual grandeur of his quiet, winter frames.
Despite its technical brilliance, however, Cold Mountain is far from perfect. In fact, it runs into the same problem as The English Patient. Although Minghella is gifted at directing both the horrifying and the serene, he is not as suited to scenes of tenderness.
The love between Ada and Inman appears to be the driving force of Cold Mountain, yet it is its least memorable aspect. Rather than sharing palpably mutual affection, the lovers moodily spout poetry to each other, saying annoying things like, "The moments we shared are like a bag of diamonds," instead of visibly, joyously loving each other in a way that would make us care about their passion.
Perhaps because he is aware that the love story is not a strong enough foundation on which to construct his opus, Minghella throws a smorgasbord of disparate, thematic elements at his audience, ultimately resulting in a movie with an identity crisis.
Cold Mountain is equally about love, music, death, rebirth, innocence, destiny, nature and the Civil War. Of course, this is an impossible amount of themes to synthesize in a single movie, but luckily, he has an extraordinary cast and crew to fall back on. Thus, to enjoy Cold Mountain, I would recommend watching it as a movie about its own prettiness. As that, it is a rousing success.
