boring, meandering soap opera

Rating: Null/10 (25 July 2004)

Based on the best-selling novel by Charles Frazier, Anthony Minghella's `Cold Mountain' is, like his earlier snooze-fest, `The English Patient,' one of those highbrow historical romances that only a Motion Picture Academy member could love. Jude Law and Nicole Kidman play Inman and Ada, two Southerners whose budding romance is cut short when he goes off to fight in the Civil War. Though the two `lovers' barely know one another, she spends years pining away for him, while he, eventually, deserts the battlefield in order to get back to her. When her minister father dies unexpectedly, Ada, who has hitherto led a very sheltered life, is forced to fend for herself on the land he left her. Eventually joining her in that endeavor is a feisty young woman named Ruby, played with a whole host of annoying, self-conscious mannerisms by the usually reliable Renee Zellweger.
In ambiance and plot, `Cold Mountain' feels an awful lot like a warmed over `Gone With the Wind,' right down to the Southern-belle-forced-to-demean-herself-to-survive scenario. The difference is that the two main characters in `Cold Mountain' are completely uninteresting as people and thoroughly unconvincing as lovers. In a film in which the driving force is supposed to be obsessive passion, it's odd that the romance is laid out in such lukewarm and sketchy terms. It's hard to believe that a young man would risk execution for treason trying to get back to a woman he barely knows  and it's even harder for the audience to work up much personal stake in the outcome. Ada is like a magnet drawing Inman to her, but, for the life of us, we can't figure out the attraction. Law does reasonably well as a sort of anti-hero version of Odysseus, but Kidman fails to score as a charisma-challenged Penelope  or Scarlett O'Hara, if you prefer.
Another problem with `Cold Mountain' is that it overdoses on Southern-fried cornpone and backwater moonshine. Every time Inman or Ada turn a corner, they seem to be confronted by yet another `colorful' Southern character  be it a fornicating preacher, a clan of promiscuous hillbillies, a fiddler-playing, ne'er-do-well daddy, or even the over-the-top Ruby herself, whose way with a folksy aphorism, after some initial appeal, eventually ends up setting the teeth on edge. The film is a strangely schizophrenic one in that, while the lead characters are underdeveloped to the point of blandness, the secondary characters are overdrawn to the point of buffoonery. The film, after awhile, begins to resemble the casting call for an out-of-town revival of Tennessee Williams.
There are a few good things about `Cold Mountain.' It doesn't shy away from some of the more brutal aspects of war and it deals head-on with the struggles the Southerners had to undergo being on the losing side. Moreover, some of the vistas are attractive. But, apart from a few effective moments, `Cold Mountain,' is little more than a boring, meandering, high-toned soap opera, just the kind of movie that makes Academy members sit up and take notice come nomination time (the film garnered seven nominations and one win  for Zellweger's performance). The rest of us are more likely to just curl up and go to sleep instead.