Civil War drama with epic grandeur and well-judged details, but curiously cast and ultimately draining...

Rating: 5/10 (25 November 2007)

In 1860s North Carolina, the daughter of a recently-deceased Reverend awaits a handsome carpenter's return from war, unaware that he was wounded after several violent battles with the Yankees and deserted his troop; meanwhile, with no means of support, she takes in a female ranch-hand to help transpose her bedraggled farm. Director Anthony Minghella, who also adapted the screenplay from Charles Frazier's book, shows a masterly tableaux feel for wartime savagery, and his openings moments of battle are vivid, acrid, and powerful. The unconsummated love story between Nicole Kidman and Jude Law doesn't work as well, mainly due to the past-and-present story structure but also because of the casting, which fails to come off. Kidman seems too womanly for this role--too alert and capable and grown-up--so it doesn't quite wash (in the dramatic sense) for her to be pining after a young man after just one goodbye kiss (and why did she pick him in the first place? we've already been told she could have any man she wanted); Law, who overdoes his performance with too much emphasis on his haunted stare, is a really odd choice to play a Southern American left alienated by wartime; Oscar winner Renée Zellweger comes into the picture at just the right time and, though her accent doesn't completely convince, she gives the proceedings a little spirit. Minghella treats this scenario with great care, and he triumphs with small, individual scenes (such as the slaves hiding in the cornfield with their basket of eggs, the rotting corncobs on the stalk, the drift of the first winter snow), but he loses his way intermittently (mostly with the extraneous story threads, such as the one with the preacher about to kill a slave because "she's got my bastard in her belly!"). The howlers in the script are not gingerly trotted out--the whole film, with its pluses and minuses, is unashamedly forthright and unsubtle. Still, this treatment only works on occasion, and the length is self-defeating. ** from ****