The stars are the weak points

Rating: 7/10 (6 November 2006)

"Cold Mountain" - a movie that you can watch.
Script: tight, if you can mentally insert the "Years later..." card between a few scene cuts, and I know you can. A few Oscar-bait monologues are clunky in that adapted-from-the-novel way... but that's just me, I like to be shown rather than told by a character what they're going through.
Production design: convincing, believable, with that old movie-magic feeling of being a window into the way people lived oh so long ago and far away... (though when Kidman walks in front of it, the jarring incongruity jumps out that, despite her partial grime-over, there simply were no women as pretty as Nicole Kidman 140 years ago. Squinty-eyed pout-machine Zellweger looks more like Appalachian mountain breeding stock.)
Cinematography: Amazing. Everything has the natural light look - absolutely absorbing. One of the most beautiful winter snow scenes ever filmed.
Story: Good Guys good, Bad Guys bad... with their character conflict/resolutions built right in. A series of long, protracted tragedies you don't have to see comin' round the mountain when they come. But still, the familiar crudeness and cruelty of events have that original-source feel - when life was more of the hardscrabble scrape than the dreamworld we live in.
Casting: Ahhhhh... this is where the movie both succeeds and fails.
It's mostly inspired. Jude Law and Brendan Gleeson are very good... no, they're excellent.
The character actors are all first-rate - I mean, you could SMELL the backwoods witch goat-lady.
Jack White does a fine understated job, though I found it impossible to stop seeing Jack White and thinking how cool it was that Jack White was in this movie, and wondering if Jack White was really playing his instrument.
(It couldn't have been more amazing if his character's name was "Jack White" too - I mean, that even sounds like the name of a traveling mountain musician. Anyhow, the point is it kind of breaks the spell. )
And Philip Seymore Hoffman is good in anything.
But this movie belongs to Ray Winstone. His Confederate villain is more than just menacing. He's got the violence of battlefield madness in his quiet voice. (Can you believe he's British ? His Southern accent wasn't just convincing, it was FLAWLESS, something that even American-born Yankees can't manage.)
I know villains never get For Your Consideration treatment - but this one should've instead offfffffffff..... (*drum roll*)
ZELLWEGER-MANIA !
She won award after award for this. People gushed about how great she was as the comic relief. Hm. I didn't find anything she said or did particularly comic. And I could spend a little while detailing why she shouldn't have all those awards. Cause Renée Zellweger stinks.
Her accent is inconsistent and drawling - it's Appalachian mountain folk accent, Renée, not Savannah, not 'Bama, not Texas or Nawlinz... Study the dialect tapes, honey. Amazingly, she's up against British, Australian, and Irish lead actors, and yet her accent is the weakest. Maybe that's why she kept changing her mind about it as the movie progressed. (Do like Kidman does - pick one wrong accent, and stick with it.)
Zellweger plays her character with three emotions - mad, madder, and wounded-&-mad. But it's not the bitter anger of a young woman whose life has already let her down and had to come up fighting - it's more like the pouting petulance of a teenager who spends most of the day brooding cause she's mad at her mom. She's so ADORABLE when she pouts ! Oh no, her pouting is out of control ! Ha ha, oh, Renée !
How does Zellweger keep getting work ? Beats me. I wonder if her British affectation is any more convincing.
Who would've been better in this role ? Oh, I could say something cruel like, "Hold an open casting call and throw a rock."
But instead, let me ask who might have been a WORSE casting choice for Renée Zellweger's role. The answer springs immediately to mind: Winona Rider. An only slightly worse choice.
Also, it seems Nicole Kidman is in the movie. "Cold Mountain" may have originally been a vehicle for her. I like Kidman, and she's done good work elsewhere; it's just that this was just not a standout role for her. Next to the wailing klaxon horn of Zellweger's acting, Kidman seems merely to perform adequately. And again, it doesn't help that she's just too Hollywood-pretty for the part.
Truthfully, both female leads could've been cast better. Because the other issue is that not for a MOMENT did I believe that Jude Law's and Nicole Kidman's characters were attracted to each other.
Sting, who used to be a rock and roll singer, wrote the theme song that uses the word "ain" in the title, which just gives me Reason #98 to want to kick him in the *ss. But I can't fault the movie's music at all. Good score, great sound.
So there you go. "Cold Mountain." A movie that you can watch.