Moving Wartime Romance

Rating: Null/10 (8 January 2004)

Cold Mountain makes us give thanks that we do not live in a time and place of war. It, like few other films (Polanski's The Pianist for one) gives us a visceral sense of the chaos of wartime. Such films do not limit their depiction of war to epic battle sequences; perhaps even more horrifyingly, they show us the small scale, behind-the-lines struggles necessary for survival in such times.
Jude Law plays Inman, a working-class North Carolinian, who is smitten with the new preacher's daughter, Ada Monroe (Nicole Kidman). Their love does not have half a chance, because Inman is handed his Southern grays just as things are getting interesting. Despite having known each other a very short time, Ada promises to wait for Inman. She and Inman hope to be reunited in a month when the war is over. This is not to be.
Much of the running time of Cold Mountain, then, consists of Inman trying to return to Cold Mountain and his Ada, a quest of Odyssian proportions. Director Anthony Minghella has a knack for portraying passionate romances that ring very true in times of war. Before I recalled that Minghella had directed both films, I found myself drawing parallels between Cold Mountain and 1996's The English Patient.
While Inman dodges death on almost a daily basis, things are also not going smoothly back in Cold Mountain. A local baddie, Teague (Ray Winstone) is instituting his own, rather wicked, variety of law and taking advantage of the lack of able-bodied men to abuse the local populace. The near-starved Ada gets some much-needed help on her crumbling farm from Ruby Thewes (played more effectively than I had expected by Renee Zellweger).
Cold Mountain is a thought provoking film. It makes us ponder how much time we really need to fall in love with someone. Ada and Inman certainly haven't known each other very long, and are not even able to correspond much (letters often don't arrive during wartime). But Minghella and the lead actors so masterfully express these characters' all-consuming desire to be reunited that we can only acknowledge the power of the romance and hope fervently that the lovers are reunited.
I was troubled when I saw The Last Samurai. Although the film presented a sensitive and favorable portrayal of the Japanese bushido code compared to the evils of modern nationalism, I thought it went too far in glorifying `honorable' military death. Not so here. Minghella and author Charles Frazier give us a much darker, more realistic depiction of war. Inman says it best: `I'm like every fool sent off with a flag and a lie'.