If You Haven't Seen It, Don't

Rating: 3/10 (19 January 2004)

Cold Mountain is seriously over-rated and over-blown. It would be improved by losing an hour, and from this viewer's standpoint, by losing the entire 2-1/2 hours. It is s l o w, utterly predictable and irritating. Neither Nicole Kidman nor Jude Law make convincing Southerners and, though she won an Academy Award for her role, Renee Zellweger is less believable than either of them. For obvious reasons, Cold Mountain reminded me of Gone with the Wind, another Civil War story that seemed to this movie-goer to last longer than the war itself. Though the earlier movie belonged to the romantic fiction category and this one pretends to be more realistic, they are alike in seeking to capture (as does Tolstoy's War and Peace) history through the stories of fictional characters. Tolstoy, of course, produced a truly great novel which no film maker has yet brought successfully to the screen. In its time, Gone with the Wind was an extremely successful movie from a box office standpoint and won many awards which, in this reviewer's opinion, were totally undeserved. It was based on a very bad though quite popular novel. As a novel, Cold Mountain is better than Gone with the Wind though that isn't saying much. As a movie, it also won more awards than it deserved but it fell short of the success the makers hoped for and may have expected. Gone with the Wind is proof of the adage that no one ever went broke under-estimating the taste of the American people. Cold Mountain is less dramatic proof of the same adage. It didn't make its producers rich but it didn't exactly make them poor either. Crimes against art often pay very well.