Cold Mountain
Three quarters of "Cold Mountain" consist of some of the most masterful and absorbing filmmaking of the year. The final quarter is Hollywood business as usual. I'm not sure whether to be thankful for the first or incredibly depressed about the second.
Charles Frazier's best-selling novel -- a lyrical, Homeric odyssey about a Civil War soldier's journey home to the land and the woman he loves -- has been given the full Miramax treatment in director Anthony Minghella's adaptation. It has been Epic-ized, with opening scenes of battle that recall the horrific chaos of the Normandy invasion in "Saving Private Ryan" and with a sense of landscape and history that fill the frame with allegorical weight. People also talk more than they do in Frazier, but that's to be expected when you turn a largely interior novel inside out and spill its contents onto the screen.
Such elegant bigness is also to be expected from Minghella, who did right by Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient" and reasonably well by Patricia Highsmith's "The Talented Mr. Ripley." But many of the smaller, more personal scenes in "Cold Mountain" have the wounding ache of human connections found and lost, and they remind you that this director also made 1991's little-known "Truly Madly Deeply," one of the more heartbreaking romantic ghost stories of modern times.
Minghella has a skill for conveying the things people say to one another when they don't say anything at all, and it serves him beautifully for much of "Cold Mountain." The scenes between Inman (Jude Law), the laconic farmer who goes off to war, and Ada Monroe (Nicole Kidman), the smart and helpless city girl who has moved to the rural hamlet of Cold Mountain in North Carolina with her preacher father (Donald Sutherland), swoon with the intensity of a love too huge to name itself. Law has the stiff innocence of a figure in a daguerreotype -- and the pale gray eyes to match -- and he's so tenderly speechless that he leaves Ada, for the first time in her life, with nothing to fall back upon.
"Cold Mountain" begins with a grueling re-creation of the siege of Petersburg: Union forces have laid explosives beneath the enemy, and the entire Confederacy seems to buckle when they go off. The movie then sketches in the couple's courtship and dogtrots alongside the wounded Inman as he begins the long walk home. At the same time, Ada is coping with the management of her failing farm, a task for which an educated young woman is spectacularly unsuited. Cold Mountain has been taken over by the thugs of local strongman Teague (Ray Winstone), who covets both farm and Ada, and who twirls his mustache in a worrisome sign of cliches looming over the horizon.
The early scenes are underscored by the letters Ada and Inman have written each other, many unreceived but still read aloud in voice-over. These have the carefully formal passion of another age: They're deeply moving, but "Cold Mountain" is still threatening to freeze over when Renee Zellweger arrives to light a match under the proceedings.
She plays Ruby Thewes, a homeless mountain girl who possesses all the skills Ada lacks, and both character and actress bring a spit-in-your-eye directness that is a comic delight -- you immediately feel the movie's motor rev up. The two women join up with Sally (Kathy Baker), a local woman who has fallen victim to Teague's rapaciousness, and they become a stoic triptych of homefront suffering.
At the same time, Inman is encountering a gallery of rogues and victims that feels like a tour of history's depredations. Philip Seymour Hoffman puts in a high-flying appearance as a two-faced minister; Giovanni Ribisi is on hand as a farmer with a harem of degenerate sirens; Natalie Portman plays a widowed young mother in the middle of nowhere. Look fast and you'll see Jena Malone rowing a ferryboat, Cillian Murphy as a Union soldier, and even rocker Jack White of the White Stripes as an itinerant musician. (He even sings a handful of tunes -- unplugged, as was then the fashion.)
These middle sections of the movie are intensely pleasurable, partly because Minghella's hand is so sure and partly because you have no idea who will show up next. If there are few African-American faces to be seen, the director hints at why in the ghostly sequence in which a family of slaves emerges from a cornfield, stares uncomprehendingly at Inman, and moves on. They're there, all right -- they're just hiding.
"Cold Mountain" moves its parallel story lines closer and closer until they blissfully merge, and the action flows and dips to the strains of a gorgeous set of old-time songs arranged by T-Bone Burnett, who did the same favor for "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" Law, anchoring a major motion picture for the first time, conveys all the yearning of the book with a more visceral expressive poetry, and Zellweger at last seems completely at home in a role.
Even Kidman has the right headstrong grace as Ada -- until she becomes a woman of the land under Ruby's tutelage, and the movie slowly goes south even as Inman heads north. A subplot involving Ruby's rascally musician father (Brendan Gleeson) takes over and becomes entwined with the threat from Teague and his men (one, played by Charlie Hunnam, is a sneering albino killer; the character was in the book but seems to have wandered in from a "Lethal Weapon" movie all the same).
More ruinous to the delicate vibe of "Cold Mountain" is that Kidman gets more and more ravishing as she works that farm. We've had a premonition in the scenes with Portman -- who looks awfully well manicured for a starving woman -- but the sun bleaches Kidman's hair and brings out the color in her cheeks more professionally than all the stylists in Los Angeles. By the climactic scenes, Ada has morphed into a raw-boned Hollywood goddess.
This is miscalculation, pure and simple -- it offends our sense of reason, let alone callouses -- and the other characters in "Cold Mountain" are diminished in Kidman's Noxzema glow. Zellweger plays it broader and broader, until Ruby threatens to assume Mammy Yokum proportions, and Winstone's scruffy little Teague never amounts to more than a plot necessity.
Only Law remains a law unto himself, carrying the movie's themes of hope and endurance with silent eloquence all the way to the curiously shopworn end. He's a great actor, a mesmerizing presence, and here, at last, he proves he's a star. Flaws and all, "Cold Mountain" burns to be seen, for its stunning middle episodes and to witness what a shape-shifting talent can do with so little in the way of words.
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