Cold Mountain (DVD)

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Opening Rounds from John J. Puccio:
As I've said before in these pages, soap is soap. Which isn't necessarily bad. I mean, millions of people watch soap operas every afternoon. Besides, "Gone With the Wind" was a soap opera of grand dimensions and a classic movie. Vivien Leigh played a strong-willed and sometimes annoying young woman. Butterfly McQueen played a decidedly annoying but endearing young woman. And Clark Gable was magnificent. The movie's diverse action, persuasive acting, deft direction, elaborate sets, and beautiful cinematography helped its four hours fly by in no time.

The 2003 Civil War drama "Cold Mountain" aspires to be another "Gone With the Wind," complete with many of the earlier movie's characters and exploits. Nicole Kidman plays a strong-willed but annoyingly bland young woman. Renee Zellweger borrows from the Butterfly McQueen school of performing arts, playing a character so colorful the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in its inscrutable wisdom awarded her an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. And Jude Law is nondescript. The movie's two-and-a-half hours can seem like forever.

If this sounds harsh, understand there is still much to like in "Cold Mountain," if only it weren't so long and didn't serve up so much that comes across so ordinary. Actually, the movie is interesting to look at much of the time, very authentic in period detail, and whether it's because Kidman and Law underact or because their characters are just plain dull, Zellweger upstages everyone around her. No, the film's appearance and acting are fine; it's the screenplay by writer-director Anthony Minghella ("Truly, Madly, Deeply," "The English Patient," "The Talented Mr. Ripley"), based on the popular novel by Charles Frazier, that's to fault, laden as it is with the wholly expected, the commonplace, and the derivative.

I'm afraid if it weren't for "GWTW" and "Ken Burns' Civil War" (not to mention the "Odyssey"), there probably wouldn't be a "Cold Mountain"; it's that dependent upon the older sources. The settings; the young Southern men whooping it up as they go off to what they think is going to be a glorious war; the poor, elegant lady left behind to tend the farm; the bad times; the killing of the last chicken; the evil overseer; the long and perilous journey home; the hero's eventual return; the music; yes, the music; and, of course, the love story. Indeed, this is basically a romance in the most romantic sense of the word, and if it weren't for the violence, the brutality, the nudity, and the several frank sexual scenes that earn the film an R rating, it might have been termed a romantic "family" picture. As it is, the film may be too disagreeably harsh for viewers looking primarily for a romance and too romantic for viewers looking primarily for action or adventure. The mixture of romance and adventure in "Cold Mountain" is rather too awkward, mawkish, and obvious to be entirely credible, but we have come to expect that from a typical soap.

Anyway, the story concerns a young woman, Ada Monroe (Kidman), who in 1861 moved to the little North Carolina valley town of Cold Mountain with her father, a minister (Donald Sutherland). He had come for his health, having to leave the refined elegance of Charleston for the more rustic pleasures of Cold Mountain. They are not there long before Ada meets an itinerant laborer, W.P. Inman (Law), and they instantly fall in love. But they barely have time for a single kiss before he is off to fight the dreaded Yankees.

Ada narrates the action, as the time shifts constantly in the movie's first half between the past (1861) and the present (1864). Things get hard for Ada with the town's men gone. She lets her slaves go, and there is no one to tend her lands. Her father dies. There is no food or money to be had. By the time three years pass, she writes to Inman asking him to drop everything, like the War, and please come back. Meanwhile, Inman has seen men literally blasted out their clothes (in a scene reminiscent of one described by Erich Maria Remarque in "All Quiet on the Western Front"). He's seen enough death and destruction for a lifetime, and he's ready to go home. Deserters are being shot on sight, but he decides to chance it. Just why he would give up the noble cause he was so eager to support and risk death for desertion can only be attributed to his devotion to Ada. Whatever she's got, he obviously wants it.

The bulk of the movie concerns Inman's desperate and determined attempts to return to Ada and Ada's resolve to take care of herself and remain faithful to Inman. Just what either of them see in one another beyond their physical attractiveness is hard to fathom, she a cultured and educated lady, he a rough, slow-talking workman. I guess if it's love at first sight, you don't question fate. Moreover, we see Inman charm a dove, so perhaps his just being in the right place at the right time charms Ada, too.

Prissy, er, Ruby (Zellweger) shows up on Ada's farm practically out of nowhere to lend a hand with the matter of living. Apparently, Ada's neighbors arranged the meeting, thinking Ada needed the help. Ruby is a country girl, barely having gone through the third grade, tough, worldly wise, hard speaking, and as practical as Ada is idealistic. It is only Ruby, as exaggerated a character as she is, that brings any life to the proceedings.

Into both Ada's and Inman's lives come a series of trials, tribulations, disasters, adventures, calamities, and temptations as Ada tries to keep the home fires burning and Inman tries simply to get home. The sequences come and go without much cohesion, merely a string of exciting and/or melodramatic moments, and the love story is a bit like "Sleepless in Seattle" in that the two lovebirds hardly see each other at all until the very end of the film.

Among the many supporting actors in the story, Brendon Gleeson plays Ruby's father, a likeable layabout who deserted her long before and comes around wanting help when he, too, deserts the Southern cause. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the Reverend Veasey, a defrocked clergyman whom Inman picks up along the way. Natalie Portman plays a lonely, tempting young widow with a baby that Inman meets along his odyssey home. And Ray Winstone plays the villain of the piece, Teague, a man too old to go to war, who remains in Cold Mountain as the leader of the Home Guard. It's his duty to harass the locals, keep an evil eye on Ada, and shoot deserters on sight. Like all dastardly villains, he has no heart.

If, in fact, any of this sounds vaguely like Homer's "Odyssey," it is, says the film's creators, because that's what it's supposed to remind you of. Inman's attempts to return home to Ada, with constant trouble along the way, are intended to conjure up visions of Odysseus's frustrated attempts to return home to Penelope. The question one must ask is, So what?

The music of the movie will remind many listeners of the music in "Ken Burns' Civil War," and one can understand how and why both films mined the same folk material. Mostly the music is quiet, mournful, and melancholy, although during the initial battle sequence it is rather overdone with its choral accompaniment. The scenes of war and devastation are naturalistic to the extreme, and some shots may make viewers turn away. As compensation, the cinematography is sometimes ravishing as we get widescreen panoramas of mountains, forests, rivers, and valleys. But is any of this enough to compensate for the movie's leaden pace and overreliance on clichés and stereotypes? Not really.

A measure of the film's lack of effectiveness is the fact that after the Wife-O-Meter and I spent what seemed like an entire afternoon watching "Cold Mountain," we were both surprised to note that it was barely half finished. We thought the film was so slow moving that poor old Inman would never get home. When he did, I'm not sure it was worth our bother. While the film is handsome to look at and has its fair share of realism, it also gets plenty sappy along the way. A 6/10 at best.

Video:
The picture quality is very good but not exactly ideal. The anamorphic screen size admirably mirrors its 2.35:1 theatrical exhibition ratio, rendered here as approximately 2.11:1 across a standard television. There is a slight grain noticeable, especially in nighttime scenes, but this is not unusual to the best film stock. Overall, the image is fairly smooth despite the small degree of grain. Daylight shots are bright and well delineated; colors are natural, if a tad dark; and haloes and moiré effects are noticeable at times but only a problem if you're looking for them.