War gets in the way of love

By A. O. Scott
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Friday, Feb 20, 2004, Page 20

Were it not for a gruesomely violent battle sequence at the beginning, a smattering of profanity and an occasional glimpse of unclothed flesh, Cold Mountain might easily be mistaken for the product of an earlier era of movie-making. The film, freely adapted by Anthony Minghella from Charles Frazier's best-selling novel, is an episodic romance that begins like a war movie and ends like a western, and it requires an old-fashioned critical idiom to do it justice. It is, as my predecessor Bosley Crowther might have said, one heck of a classy picture.

I mean this both as sincere praise and as a qualification of that praise. Cold Mountain, at once generous and self-congratulatory, full of lush scenery and large emotions, clearly longs for a home on the video store's classics shelf. To speed its passage, it arrives laden with the trappings of prefabricated cultural prestige, including a high-toned literary pedigree and a lustrous cast of past and future Oscar winners and nominees. The film, opening nationwide today, thus follows in what has become a Miramax tradition of highly polished, and often lifeless, literary adaptations, including The English Patient (also directed by Minghella), The Cider House Rules and Chocolat.

Film Notes Directed By: Anthony Minghella starring:Jude Law (Inman), Nicole Kidman (Ada Monroe), Renee Zellweger (Ruby Thewes), Donald Sutherland (Reverend Monroe), Ray Winstone (Teague), Brendan Gleeson (Stobrod), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Veasey), Natalie Portman (Sara) Running Time: 155 minutes Taiwan Release: Today

Fortunately, Cold Mountain, which stars Jude Law and Nicole Kidman as would-be lovers separated by the cruelty and privation of the American Civil War, distinguishes itself from such middlebrow conversation-stoppers. Its sober good taste is enlivened by large doses of intelligence and humor, and even a touch of authentic cinematic grandeur.

By authentic I mean utterly artificial. Minghella, who can be overly solemn in pursuit of realism, is, thank goodness, also entranced by the beauty of exotic landscapes and the charisma of movie stars. Kidman, playing Ada Monroe, a citified preacher's daughter stranded in the remote hamlet of Cold Mountain, North Carolina, has never been lovelier, and her radiance at once challenges your disbelief and compels you to suspend it. Even dressed in cast-off men's clothes and struggling against the rigors of 19th-century rural life, she looks as if she had stepped from the pages of a glossy magazine, her eyebrows and cuticles painstakingly attended to. This incongruity adds to the movie's charm rather than dispelling it.

And in nearly every particular -- including the soundtrack, which blends Gabriel Yared's lavish symphonic orchestration with Appalachian fiddle breakdowns and Deep-South Sacred Harp vocal harmonies -- the movie's elegant fakery improves on the book's stiff pretentiousness. The gothic landscape of Romania (beautifully photographed by John Seale) stands in for the hills and hollows of western North Carolina, and the plain country people who inhabit the novel's mock-folksy episodes are impersonated onscreen by a platoon of well-respected actors, many of them British, who drawl their vowels and clip their consonants into approximations of Southern American dialect.

Law's accent is probably the most convincing, and his matinee-idol features are, for much of the movie, camouflaged by grime, fatigue and an unkempt beard. One peculiarity of Cold Mountain is that it is a love story in which the two romantic leads share little screen time and often seem to inhabit separate movies. In early flashbacks, Ada and Inman, Law's wry, taciturn character, trade flirtatious glances and share a rushed farewell kiss, but mostly they are apart, clinging to the dim prospect of reunion as a survival strategy.

The story's pathos comes from the disproportionate intensity of their longing. They barely know each other, and their love is an attempt to conjure an idea of happiness in grim times.

Inman, wounded in the battle of Fredericksburg, steps out of the window of a squalid Virginia military hospital and undertakes a long inland trek toward home. Ada, after the death of her father (Donald Sutherland), must contend with a harsh lifestyle for which her cosseted upbringing has left her unsuited. To help Ada manage her father's sprawling farm, her neighbor, Sally (Kathy Baker), sends over a no-nonsense spitfire named Ruby (Renee Zellweger), instigating a friendship that becomes the film's central relationship.

Zellweger, wild-haired and ornery, clomps through the scenery like a migrant from Li'l Abner's Dogpatch. Her earthiness warms up Cold Mountain considerably, and her scenes with Kidman have a loose, improvisatory rhythm missing from much of the movie. They work together like a seasoned comedy team, and Minghella makes the most of their differences in temperament and appearance.

While Ada grapples with farm work and the unwelcome attentions of Teague (Ray Winstone), an officer in the Home Guard who terrorizes the people of Cold Mountain in the name of the faltering Confederate cause, Inman slogs through a landscape populated by figures out of old murder ballads and tall tales.

Law, a hint of mischief lingering around his tired eyes, meets up with a parade of Hollywood hillbillies, including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Natalie Portman, Giovanni Ribisi and Eileen Atkins. (Among the very few black people he sees is a silent, briefly glimpsed band of runaway slaves.) Alternating between these encounters and Kidman' s home-front stoicism, Cold Mountain unfolds in lyrical counterpoint.

Its awkward beginning -- a jumble of flashbacks, voice-overs and confusing combat scenes -- reveals the structural challenge Minghella faced in adapting the novel, which seesaws between the present and the past and includes numerous digressions and side narratives. Imitating it too faithfully would have killed the film's fragile momentum, but Minghella, working with the matchlessly resourceful editor Walter Murch, has tightened Frazier's ungainly tale while preserving its epic capaciousness.

The result is a mountain of honest, nourishing corn, a lavish evocation of simplicity that, for all its showy sophistication, has an appealing emotional directness. For all its sweep and scope and movie-star magic, Cold Mountain is studded with fine small moments and deft supporting performances, notably from Atkins, Portman and Brendan Gleeson, who plays Ruby's wayward, fiddle-playing father.

The final assault on the heartstrings is marred only by the inevitable sex scene, a concession to modern sensibilities that makes you long for the old days of Production Code repression, when instead of a few minutes of peekaboo montage and heavy breathing, Inman and Ada would have consummated their love with a blown-out candle, a closed door, and a few wispy clouds suggestively passing across the moon.