War is all hell.

Rating: 6/10 (26 July 2005)

There's a stunning scene towards the end when Jude Law approaches his long-lost girlfriend, Nicole Kidman, on a snowy path through what appears to be an archway of rock pinnacles all dusted with white. Law is hardly more than a scrawny black scarecrow in a slouch hat. Not recognizing him after a year's absence she fires two warning shots towards him. He is shaken and begins to turn away, thinking she's forgotten him, but then awareness comes to her and she calls out, "Inman?"
Now, what follows ought to be a slow-motion shot of the two figures running towards each other and weeping with joy. She runs and weeps and laughs in slow motion. He runs and weeps and laughs in slow motion. But, no. Minghella, the director, has Law and Kidman crunch towards one another cautiously, as if neither is entirely certain that what is happening is not an hallucination. And Minghella cuts away from the reunion after only a brief and tasteful moment.
The movie is a series of rather loosely linked episodes, cutting back and forth between Law making his lonely and dangerous way back home from the battlefield, and Kidman who is about to starve on her wretched farm because, as a gentlewoman, she was taught only what was useless. She can name all the plants in Latin but she can't grow them. Renee Zellweger shows up at the opportune moment, a no-nonsense practical independent and blunt young woman who is able to show Kidman the ropes.
The initial meeting between Law and Kidman only lasts for a few minutes, and they are together at the end just long enough for the anticipated climax, so to speak, but everything in between the beginning and the end kind of meanders about, like one of the ox bow lakes that Law must traverse during his journey. What the heck is going on?
What seems to be going on is mostly two things. First, the movie gives us a pretty good ethnographic picture of the folks who lived in the Upland South in the 1860s. (Good production design and wardrobe.) There are no magnificent steps in the Big House for Bette Davis to trip down in a hoop skirt, just old weathered shacks whose shingles need replacing and whose corn cribs must be filled if the inhabitants are to survive the winter. Come to think of it, there are no hoop skirts at all. Everyone is dressed in more than usually drab garments, usually dirty. Even the women's underwear is yellow and blotched. The dialog isn't noticeably Upland South though. In the Lowland South, say around Charleston, "sir" becomes "suh," but in the mountains it is "sirr." Not an important point.
Because of their beards and raggedy clothing the men tend to look alike. They all look like Chuck Norris, unless they are older and look like James Gammon. In fact one of them IS James Gammon. Nicole Kidman's visage is as sleek as her figure. She could be the hood ornament on an old, ornate automobile.
Some of the episodes are more interesting than others although it was never too difficult to figure out who would survive and who would die. Philip Seymour Hoffman as one of those pasquinades of pastoral piety is a riot. What music he lends his lines! And at one point Law is invited to spend the night in bed with Natalie Portman, her husband long dead, who writhes with grief, guilt, and horniness as she asks him to promise that if he lies down next to her he "won't go no further." Righto! It reminded me of a similar scene in which a lad was successfully tested in "Tales of the Arabian Nights", to which the translator, Richard Burton, had added a rare footnote -- "The young man must have been a demon of chastity."
I have a feeling there is a moral to this movie. The moral is that war should be entered into only as a last resort, but I'm not sure.