One of those kinds of pictures practically budgeted to get Oscar nominations

Rating: 7/10 (26 December 2003)

Anthony Minghella, responsible for such films as The English Patient (which I did not like despite the acclaim) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (which I liked), returns with another adaptation- Cold Mountain, which entails the romance-during-civil war scenario passed down by the Gone with the Wind movie gods. Jude Law and Nicole Kidman play two people, Inman and Ada, who've barely known each other before Law goes off to fight in the War, but they write (Kidman contributes voice-overs that more often than not don't work or aren't needed for the story) to one another, that is until he witnesses a terrible battle years later. He becomes a deserter, as he travels across wild parts of the South on her way back to her. During this time Ada's father dies, and she's all alone until a girl from the mountains who's also lost her father, Ruby (Renee Zellweger), comes down to help on the farm. It doesn't take this reviewer to tell where the story is headed, and that's probably how Minghella liked it set up (from Charles Frazier's book).
There's much that I liked about Cold Mountain: the strong, period-perfect production design by Dante Ferretti, an entertaining battle sequence near the beginning, and an all-star cast that, though mostly supporting, does it's job well. And among the Oscar nominations the film is bound to receive (from my perspective this film follows in the tradition that Miramax puts out at least one film every year around this time to garner some space in the audience at the show), I'd say that Zellweger could perhaps get her's. What I didn't think was all that great about the movie, and what makes it over-rated, is that it's a story that makes itself too clear that this will happen now, and this will happen in the next scene, and in a few minutes we can expect this, and so on. The presence of confederate soldiers, always on the look out for traitors around Ada's region, makes it all too by-the-books, so to speak. A couple of minutes could've been chopped off as well. Is it a well made movie? yes, but maybe it's TOO well made for its own good.