Tough Climb

Rating: 6/10 (5 April 2007)

Some films are like sprints. "Cold Mountain" is a marathon. It pushes and pulls you a long way from point A to point Z, forcing you to bear witness to a lot of cruelty, devastation, and wildly variant plot lines, all in a sincere albeit misplaced effort to faithfully reproduce the Charles Frazier novel on screen. Oppressive, yes, but at least it's never dull.
Inman (Jude Law) is a Confederate soldier, badly wounded, who decides to give up the Civil War and return to his North Carolina home, Cold Mountain. "Come back to me is my request" writes his lover, Ada (Nicole Kidman), and he obliges. While Inman meets a deviant preacher, a young war widow, and a kindly goatwoman en route, Ada keeps the house her father owned with the help of a female Huckleberry Finn named Ruby Thewes (Renee Zellweger).
"Cold Mountain" runs nearly two and a half hours, and you feel every minute of it. Because the film compresses everything so much, trying to fit all of Frazier's vision in, it never quite breathes in the way of another longer war epic such as "Lawrence Of Arabia" (an unfairly great film, yes, but those are the stakes "Cold Mountain" director Anthony Minghella plays for). While Ruby is running Ada through various farm chores, for example, she's also providing pertinent details on her character and motivation through talky exposition. Everyone in the film seems to have a monologue to deliver, crammed one after the other like air traffic over O'Hare.
The other thing that makes "Cold Mountain" tough is its capacity for sadness. Sure bad things happen to good people, but seldom in so concentrated a form. This is also largely faithful to the book, but it should be pointed out that the novel uses its opportunity to better space out the "war is hell" theme. Also, certain characters suffer a worse fate in the movie than the novel (i.e. the Swanger family, the girl in the canoe, the war widow if you catch the extra scene on DVD). Usually films lighten up on a novel's content precisely because hard scenes one against the other alienate an audience, but Minghella trusts his audience to bear with him.
I didn't exactly, but I did admire "Cold Mountain" for what it was, a stage for uniformly splendid acting and camera-work. Law nicely develops an understated tone as Inman, man of few words, while Kidman makes the romantic parts sing louder than they otherwise would and plays a good straight man to Zellweger, who gets most of the best lines and delivers them with gusto. The only great performance I saw was Brendan Gleeson as Stobrod, who really faked me out with his accent and with Zellweger co-stars in the best sequence in the film, when they meet again after a long separation.
"He's so full of manure," Ruby says. "We could stick 'em in the dirt and grow another just like 'em."
Minghella works in some great shots that keep you watching even as they don't lead anywhere, aided by an authentic-feeling musical score that feels at times almost devastating. In this way, "Cold Mountain" pushes in your face the fact the Civil War was fought by real people, not just played out in the quaint pages of a history book.
I was reminded, with that music and Ada's voice-over letter readings, of Ken Burns' famous "Civil War" documentary. While not as inspiring or commanding as that, "Cold Mountain" retains the same aesthetic, and on that level succeeds more often than it does not. I just question anyone's ability to come to this movie without doing some serious homework, and when you do the homework, it may prove more interesting to you than the film itself.