Ain't No Mountain High Enough, Ain't No Valley Low Enough.....

Rating: Null/10 (4 February 2004)

It is really pretty easy to describe "Cold Mountain". Just take the worst parts (the very few there were) in "Gone With the Wind" and "The English Patient", mix them together and you have this ponderous, long and sometimes down-right silly epic that is still somehow saved in the end and becomes a slight winner anyway in spite of itself. The Civil War is all but over. The Confederacy is going to lose, plain and simple. Death has become a way of life across the nation, but the toll in the South is truly monumental. Soon there are Confederate deserters that try to return home. Of course this leads to the historical fact that this group becomes hunted by not only the Union, but by the very forces they once fought for. One deserter (Jude Law) tries to return to North Carolina and the titled town found within his home state. The war has all but killed him (this guy has more lives than Sylvester the Cat) and the only thing that keeps him going is his love to resident Nicole Kidman. Kidman, who is not originally from the town, had come to Carolina with her minister father (Donald Sutherland) to start a new life and build a new church. All goes awry though very quickly as Kidman falls in love with Law, but Law has to go to war. Then her father passes away and Kidman, quite sheltered and helpless really, has no one to take care of her or work the land she now owns outright. Neighbors Kathy Baker and husband James Gammon worry about Kidman and send laborer Renee Zellweger (in easily her finest role to date) to do mundane tasks and basically keep her new employer from starving to death. Soon Zellweger's long-believed-dead father (Brendan Gleeson) and two of his new friends from the war (Jack White and Ethan Suplee) come to hide out as they are now deserters as well. Naturally there is friction between Zellweger and Gleeson, but still a mutual respect, admiration and even hidden love. As all this transpires, Law runs into every sort of character you can imagine. He meets up with a sexually-addicted holy man (a priceless turn by Philip Seymour Hoffman), a somewhat simple backwoods girl (Jena Malone), a drunken farmer (Giovanni Ribisi) and even a Civil War widow/single mother (Natalie Portman). Each meeting though is far from a safe one and Law keeps on dodging bullets and pulling himself out of rough situations with his undying will and his surprising intelligence. Ray Winstone (of "Sexy Beast" fame) becomes the designated antagonist as he tries to rule Law's hometown with an iron fist. He and his band of cronies become dominant fixtures on the town's landscape and eventually become the primary assassins for Confederate deserters as well. "Cold Mountain" is a very long picture, but it seems even longer than it is. So many things happen that your head is sometimes left spinning and sadly the picture even becomes a bore at several intervals. Law is quietly effective, giving a war-weary performance. He and Kidman really have very little chemistry though and they were never completely believable as lovers to start with. Zellweger is the real revelation. Her appearance nearly comes too late to salvage the production. She ends up smothering most of the shortcomings here all by herself. Writer/director Anthony Minghella's grasp of the book is not as tight as it should have been. He sometimes gets wrapped up in beautiful cinematography and art direction and loses focus of the would-be deep characters. Sadly the characters are really not as complex as they could have been or should have been and that ultimately makes "Cold Mountain" more of an exercise than a joy. 4 stars out of 5.