A Great 45 minute movie with an outstanding supporting cast...

Rating: Null/10 (9 January 2004)

...surrounded by another 110 minutes of bad lead performances, horrible writing, bad editing, weak melodrama, incredibly obvious dialog that spells out what you already know, and very, very, very frequent boredom.

I've never seen a movie that depended on its supporting cast as much as this one. The first hour or so focuses almost entirely on stars Jude Law and Nicole Kidman--and it is one of the most deadly dull hours you've ever sat through in your life. It should be a punishable offence to make two such great talents look so amateur. It isn't until Rene Zellweger's Calamity Jane-ish Ruby appears on the screen--about an HOUR into the story--that the film shows any life at all. Luckily, Rene's performance is just the first of a series of great acting mini-masterpieces. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Giovanni Ribisi, Eileen Atkins, Jena Malone, and, most surprisingly, Natalie Portman, all do amazing bits of work. Unfortunately, they are the lonely dots of pepper in this vast pot of bland Hollywood mush. Without their work, "Cold Mountain" would just be another piece of homogenized, balless, corporate, tinseltown claptrap.

How to fix it:
1)	Get rid of the sappy music all together. I love movie music, but the score here never adds anything, it only subtracts.
2)	Cut the dialog by 70%. What we've seen we don't need a narrator to tell us, and a good story doesn't need its characters to constantly tell us why they exist or what the movie's themes are.
3)	Cut the entire film down to less than one hour and fifty minutes--because that's all the story there is.