Titanic meets the Beverly Hillbillies

Rating: 4/10 (25 May 2011)

First the good: Jude Law delivers a first-rate performance. Renée Zellweger overdoes it at first, but given the growth of her character, this can be forgiven. Nicole Kidman is Nicole Kidman.
But beyond that, the characters lack depth. Except for Kidman's father, Donald Sutherland, all of the men are either sadists or hillbilly simpletons. And even Sutherland's character comes off as being a rather simple-minded preacher, who doesn't have the decency to provide for Kidman after he is gone.
So, ladies, all men are oafs, at best, except for that one ideal man of your dreams, in this case Inman, who is easily manipulated by a pretty, scheming woman. Kidman (Ada) and Inman meet after Maddy suggests Ada could bat her eyes and get him to clear her field. They meet, and next we see Inman clearing the field. So, naturally, Ada falls in love with such a malleable man. This is romance?
And all the women are good, caring, honest, hard working, and detest the violence of war. Except for the hillbilly family, in which case they are drunken whores.
All hillbillies are stupid and have bad manners, and almost all Southerners who live outside the city are hillbillies, with poor hygiene (contrasted with Kidman, who always looks like she is fresh from a cosmetics ad shoot). But Zellweger is a hillbilly who is not a complete moron -- she can count to 20 and spell "catastrophe"! She is the most interesting person in the film, but, sadly, she, too, is the victim of stereotype and exaggeration.
In Cold Mountain, we've got cartoonish caricatures masquerading as people, much like The Beverly Hillbillies. And, like Titanic, we've got a black and white world of either very good, saintly people -- the women plus Inman -- or very evil, sadistic, stupid people -- the men.
Plus, we've got the all-too-brief romantic love affair that is too perfect to ever survive on Earth, just like Titanic. So, it sounds like a formula for a chick flick.
Except, we've got unnecessarily graphic and gruesome violence, including animals being killed on camera. This is normally not allowed in American movies. The only other time I can recall this sort of thing is in British movies, and Anthony Minghella is a British director, so perhaps he thinks is all right to linger over the slaughter of a goat, as though it is art. It is not.
The way Minghella treats people is far worse, and sometimes almost laughable. Like three Yankee soldiers who threaten to kill a baby if her mother doesn't tell them where her pig is. Yeah, war is heck and there was plenty of looting, but this defies credibility.
And those home guard sadists are also beyond credibility, especially that blonde acrobatic sadist. The movie would have you believe these were the last men left in town and so the women were helpless. In North Carolina, especially along the Blue Ridge, there was less sympathy for slavery, and not every male was of draft age. Plus, in the South you could pay $300 and not have to fight.
As to slavery, the cause of the war, we do not see any actual slaves working or even talking, beyond one slave helping the Confederate army, who is treated so politely by Southerners you would think he was the town banker! Yeah, right.
Anthony Minghella resorts to time shifting in the beginning of the film, from present to future, and back to the past. It is interesting for a little while, but once you set up the film, enough is enough. This goes on for about a half hour, which is so lacking in momentum it is sorely tempting to time shift to a baseball game.
When I see this I begin to suspect the plot is too weak to survive a linear unfolding. In this case, we have boy meets girl, boy is separated from girl, boy overcomes insurmountable odds to return to girl. So the plot is a bit thin. But it is not as paper thin as "An English Patient," which, once you straighten out the story line, doesn't actually have a story line.
For the rest of the movie we have to endure cuts between Inman's Homeric odyssey of endless trials and tribulations on a 250 mile trek home, and Kidman's penniless struggle for survival. Talk about an exhausting movie!
Kidman's is the more interesting side; the story of the three women banding together to endure the war is by far the most interesting part of the picture, but, sadly, is marred by absurd exaggeration, including the near lynching of Maddy by the home guard. The extreme sadism reminds me of another foreign-created American "historical" movie, "The Patriot."
Like Titanic, there is a gratuitous graphic love scene that does not live up to the build up. Half-clothed, half-porn, all awkward, it seems to be there for the teenage girls, just like Titanic. Inman is in (Ada). We see the climax, and the result is a posthumous girl. Leaving it to the viewer's imagination would have been far more effective.
The cinematography is beautiful, though it would have been more beautiful if it had actually been filmed in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the recreation of this historical epoch is thorough enough, like Titanic, that you assume the rest of the movie is historically accurate. But like Titanic, the people do not ring true.
Minghella's instincts may have proved true to the extent that foreigners would love a film that portrays most Americans, North and South, as stupid sadists. To foreigners, this film, sadly, might seem totally realistic. (Kaori Shoji, writing in The Japan Times, was one of the few reviewers to see through this movie's stereotypes.) It is not. Cold Mountain is no more realistic than a comic book.