A Hill among Mountains

Rating: 5/10 (24 August 2004)

The romance is more complicated than that in "The Birth of a Nation", but not so much as in "Gone with the Wind". Expectations are rewarded. Slavery is mostly ignored, so there's supposedly no racism, either. A romance struggles against the vast setting of the American Civil War, but fate will reward the wait. Crosscutting between the lovers' situations was enough for me. The climax was the editing in the mollified sex scene. I must applaud any such sex scene for merely not being annoying. Additionally, it helps that the crosscutting is between Jude Law and Nicole Kidman.
We don't expect Law or Kidman's characters to die, or anything, on any of their adventures, so we get the next best thing after surprise: encounters with many stars, including Donald Sutherland, Brendan Gleeson, Renée Zellweger, Philip Seymour Hoffmann, Giovanni Ribisi and Natalie Portman. Zellweger, who gets her Oscar, and Hoffmann are actually good; the comic relief outshines the leads. Still, director Anthony Minghella has involved me in melodramatic pomp better than this, and Miramax has sold me Oscar-fare better than this.