Old Fashioned Romance, Powerful Allegory, and Sublime Craftsmanship

Rating: 10/10 (26 August 2018)

2003 was a great year for cinema and Cold Mountain towers over the the other offerings on every level. The surface layer of the film is a lush emotional romance about a a Southern Belle waiting for her Johnny Red to come back to her. Law and Kidman both are really good in their roles. Law especially gives a striking performance. I think the screenplay does a really good job handling the brief nature of the initial romantic scenes. And it is smart enough to have the characters acknowledge this aspect. It is like a updated version of Gone With The Wind.
But below the surface the story is a combination of a Christian morality play around Charity and a reworking of the odyssey. What I mean is Inman symbolically dies at the beginning of the film, wonders around the afterlife, crosses the river Styx, all to get back to heaven (Cold Mountain) etc. All the various colorful characters he meets, played wonderfully by a great cast, track with both a Christian concept and something from Greek mythology. I.e. The Hillbilly family are the sirens and lust. Inman (INRI) has messiah imagery attached to him, at one point he is weighed down with the sins of others, and it all adds up to an extremely powerful allegory. This is most apparently in the Sara (Portman) sequence where Inman cannot offer to take her to Cold Mountain with him because she was, to say the least, uncharitable towards a union soldier. It is all emotionally gripping stuff.
The cinematic craftsmanship of the film is top notch. The scope the colors in this film is extremely wide and the photography allows you to get lost in the story. The same is true for the other technical departments. The music is sublime.
Two quick notes: Ruby is easily the most entertaining part of this film and at least Zellweger got recognized finally by the Oscars.
Second: The film isn't about the civil war, the setting was selected mainly for its color and the practical aspects of a civil war (brother vs brother, friend/foe speak the same language) and because of Gone With the Wind. I don't have any idea how realistic the opening battle is but in terms of dealing with the Confederacy, despite not being really about that, this film treats it among the best I have ever seen. The Confederate cause isn't whitewashed, at least twice slavery was blatantly stated to be the confederate cause. More to the point, the home guard (allegorically the devil) is the primary source of antagonism in the film and that's the most visible part Confederacy. One can wonder if the using any war as a mere backdrop is OK for a film but here the film at least gets the main historical points across better than things like God and General.