Tasteful and Dispassionate

Rating: 5/10 (17 December 2003)

"Cold Mountain" certainly lives up to its name. It is a monumental film with almost no hint of a beating heart. To call it cerebral, as The Hollywood Reporter did, is to put a kind spin on the utter lack of passion in the storytelling and the performances, and also suggests a heady element that maybe I just missed.
From the first frames of the picture, the level of professionalism from Anthony Minghella's frequently enlisted team of craftspeople -- John Seale, Dante Ferretti, Walter Murch, Gabriel Yared, and others - is undeniable. They certainly have their act down. (At one point in the movie, I kept myself entertained by counting the impending Oscar nominations, and that game went on for some time). The film is elegant, even pristine, and so very tasteful. Within minutes, though, it's also clear that it is to be a film in which every character speaks like an aspiring poet, regardless of their level of education or their wits. The story, which the film makers purport to be about man's eternal failure to respect natural law, gives itself a cramp trying to be literate. Yet in the final outcome, it has managed neither authenticity nor poetry nor philosophy, leaving me to wonder what all the florid dialogue was in service of.
The picture nearly chokes on its pedigree. Minghella stuffed the cast with Oscar-credentialed actors (both past winners like Nicole Kidman and nominees like Jude Law) and others, like Donald Sutherland, whose very presence seems intended to maintain an air of prestige. The lot of them seemed as bored as I did with the script's simplistic philosophizing (is Law's character really dodging bullets and trudging through swamps so he can find some hermit woman who'll enlighten him that he's just part of the circle of life?). As a result no one in the cast, with only a few exceptions in the bit parts, ever manages to transcend who we know them to be. Kidman is Kidman throughout. Law is Law. Sutherland is Sutherland. Zellweger is, to a lesser degree, Zellweger, but she's also the movie's only consistent comic relief so she's spared the worst of the effect.
Kidman and Law, for their parts, look like they're asleep for most of the picture. The passion, the ennui, and the despair they both supposedly suffer is talked about, inferred, and presumably understood on the part of the audience, but I'll be damned if you can find a trace of it on their faces. Kidman especially is never given her due as the actor of incredible spunk that we know her to be. I know she could have played Ada's overwhelming fear of death - her loved one's as well as her own. If she can carry off a prosthetic nose, surely she could have let her skin take a weathering from all the hunger and hard labor her character endures. Someone decided to not let it happen that way, rather that she should remain the radiant movie star throughout, and it was a catastrophic choice, undermining the depiction of rugged endurance that the movie so desperately needs.
Renee Zellweger hams it up like a pro, and if the rest of the cast had looked a touch more alert, she might not have seemed so completely over-the-top at times. Still, she gets to say stuff like, "You can get three feet up a bull's ass just listening to what sweethearts whisper to each other," and she hits the proverbial ball out of the park every time she does. It's a showboat of a role, but in the absence of anything else really happening, her levity was really quite welcome. And yeah, she's probably got the Oscar in the bag.
Natalie Portman, whom I was shocked to find I did not recognize, is featured in the movie's only genuinely touching sequence. Her advantage was to land the role that is the least heavy-handed in the writing, and she rises gracefully to every nuance the page offers her. As a widowed mother caring for her sick baby in a cold house, she subtly negotiates an arrangement with Law's war deserter that both satisfies her unfathomable loneliness and respects his spoken-for heart. After twice succumbing to the rigor mortis of the "Star Wars" pictures, her re-emergence as a natural, warm-hearted actress is the greatest gift that "Cold Mountain" offers.
Also, the veterans Kathy Baker, as Kidman's kindly neighbor, and the great Ray Winstone as a deserter in at least two senses, are also spot-on: never forced, always real, bringing welcome doses of gravitas to every scene they're in.
The greatest disappointment for me in "Cold Mountain" is that it's the first Minghella film to paint strictly by the numbers. Everything of his I've ever seen has taken the form of a well-known model and then upset it with something wholly unexpected, but this latest holds not a single surprise. "Truly Madly Deeply" took the same premise as "Ghost," and then played against every known rule by first suggesting that the ghost may be a creation of the widow's neuroses, and then delivering as its message that love is not eternal, but that death demands that the living get on with their lives. "The Talented Mr. Ripley," though messy and somewhat ungainly, was a mesmerizing balance of travelogue and psychological thriller.
"The English Patient" is most similar to "Cold Mountain" in its intent, an epic romance playing equally to the head and to the heart, but it was one that actually deserved the "cerebral" descriptor and also brought hard-earned tears to my eyes. "The English Patient" made me feel the cleaving knife of choosing love over country. It hurt to watch Fiennes endure his choice in that film. No such sense of pain gets through in "Cold Mountain."