Could have been better

Rating: 6/10 (1 January 2004)

I had mixed feelings going into this film as the trailer was promising but it also appeared to be a film obviously gearing itself towards the Oscar race. The film itself is well shot and has some beautiful cinematography but it is the film's story that causes it to not live up to the hype. For whatever reason I found that I did not care about Nicole Kidman's side of the story nor did I care about the love story. To have a gripping love story when the main characters are not in the same scenes is hard, but not impossible, to do, and they fail here. Jude Law's side of the story is entertaining and I would argue a great 2 hour movie could have been made just with Law's story including a lot more of Phillip Seymour Hoffman's entertaining character. But instead we get a drawn out film that shows some great promise(the Civil War scene, the various character's Jude Law meets)mixed with a lot of unnecessary scenes and a story that fails to engage the viewer beyond it's surface. Overall I feel disappointed not because it was bad but because of what it could have been.