COLD MOUNTAIN (R)

Directed by Anthony Minghella. 155 minutes. Released by Miramax Films.

Starring Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Renee Zellweger, Donald Sutherland, Ray Winstone, Natalie Portman, Jena Malone, Cillian Murphy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Brendan Gleeson, Kathy Baker, Giovanni Ribisi, James Gammon, Eileen Atkins, Ethan Suplee, Lucas Black, Taryn Manning, Melora Walters, and Jack White. Screenplay by Anthony Minghella. Based upon the novel by Charles Frazier.

Inman (Jude Law) and Ada Monroe (Nicole Kidman) share what has become known as a Meet Cute as the shy and reserved, but handsome, North Carolinian country boy nails boards with his fellow Cold Mountain townsmen on what appears to be a church. As the other boys chatter away about their dreams of shootin’ them some Yankees in what they call “The War of Northern Aggression,” Inman glances upon Ada, the daughter of the kindly Reverend Monroe (Donald Sutherland), who has just moved to the small Southern mountain town from Charleston, South Carolina. Sally Swanger (Kathy Baker) is complaining to the lovely Ada about the lack of men willing to help tend her field and convinces her to enlist the help of the quiet Inman, whom she claims has a crush on the pretty newcomer. Ada grabs a tray of cider and approaches Inman with the intention of enticing him to work, not the glorified gushing that takes place between the two of them.

This scene may give little promise of a serious film about the Civil War and reinforce what some skeptical moviegoers might expect of a holiday film boasting Academy Award winners Nicole Kidman (best actress), John Seale (cinematography), Anthony Minghella (director), Academy Award eluder Renee Zellweger, Academy Award nominee Jude Law, a supporting cast to die for and a screenplay based upon the best-selling, highly touted 1997 novel by Charles Frazier- Miramax’s best shot at a multiple Academy Award winning campaign for 2003. Cynics may be correct, but Cold Mountain, Minghella’s third critically applauded, and undeniably gorgeous, film under the watchful eyes of Miramax honchos Harvey and Bob Weinstein, would also be sold short on credit.

Part war-film, part love story, and part saving the farm tale, Minghella’s two and a half hour epic jumps back and forth in time, beginning with a startling reenactment of the Petersburg campaign’s Battle of the Crater of 1864, missing from the novel, but added here for dramatic effect to the film’s benefit. As the Confederate soldiers await battle in the trenches, Northern troops plant blasting powder below them and blow a large number of the Southern soldiers to smithereens, only to make the mistake of attempting to fight an uphill battle against the angry Confederates, a mistake that results in what one of the characters refers to as a “turkey shoot.”

Inman puts on his best war face and jumps into the battle, watches a young boy (Lucas Black) receive the business end of a bayonet, sees the brown mud turn blood red from the wounds of his fellow compatriots and enemies, and barely escapes with his life. The scene is an intense one, along the lines of other recent Oscar contenders that practice the Big Bang approach, such as Gladiator, Gangs of New York, The Last Samurai and Saving Private Ryan, in which the hero somehow miraculously manages to survive a hectic onslaught of epic proportions.

The story jumps back three years prior to the aforementioned Meet Cute, which is being replayed in Inman’s head as he is first buried in dirt during the battle and then secondly shot while trying to save a friend. He winds up in the hospital, where he is read one of Ada’s letters urging him to come back to Cold Mountain. “If you are fighting, stop fighting,” she writes. “If you are marching, stop marching. Come back to me.” Though warned about the strict penalty for desertion, Inman sneaks away from the hospital to begin his Homeric odyssey home. Meanwhile, Ada has made enemies back home- a wicked local townsman vying for her affections and land named Teague (Ray Winstone) and a nasty rooster- as well as a new friend and farmhand, not servant mind you, in the form of a plucky Renee Zellweger who goes by the name of Ruby Thewes (pronounced like Ruby Tuesday). The film is hereafter divided into two interweaving stories: Inman’s death-ridden journey from Virginia to the hills of North Carolina, meeting an odd and abundant assortment of characters along the way and Ada and Ruby’s attempts at keeping the farm from going under, as well as warding off Teague and his band of home guards, hired hands who search out and kill deserters.

The film is, at heart, a love story, though the leads spend most of the film’s running time apart. Inman and Ada hardly know each other from the few passing moments they spent together up until she makes her promise to wait for him; and half of the film’s mystery lies in whether or not they will want to remain together should he not die on his voyage home and should she not starve from lack of crops. This separation and lack of interaction between the film’s leads put a heavy burden on the shoulders of the supporting characters. They are up to the task.

In terms of casting, Minghella’s film is The Thin Red Line of Civil War films with supporting roles filled by an abundance of talented actors. Cold Mountain was shot in Romania, much of it in the beautiful Carpathian Mountains, which would explain the overabundance of European actors playing Southerners. Kidman, of course, is Australian and Law is British, but we also have Irish actor Brendan Gleeson as Ruby’s ne’er do well father, and more than a handful of gifted British actors- Eileen Atkins as a backwoods savior, Sexy Beast’s Winstone as Teague, Cillian Murphy as a northern soldier, and Charlie Hunnam. From the U.S., there is Sutherland as Ada’s father, Melora Walters and Taryn Manning as the sirens on Inman’s odyssey, Giovanni Ribisi as a minor villain, Ethan Suplee as a slow-witted musician, Jack White of the White Stripes as Georgia, Ruby’s love interest and traveling companion of her father, and Natalie Portman as a widowed mother.

In both storylines, there is a scene-stealer; and in Inman’s it is Philip Seymour Hoffman, arguably the best male supporting actor in the business, as a philandering minister whom we first catch sight of attempting to kill a slave woman he has impregnated in order to save his own hide from the zealous townspeople he calls his flock. An actor with an assortment of roles under his belt, including the obnoxious rich kid Freddie Miles in Minghella’s last film, The Talented Mr. Ripley, the sensitive nurse of Magnolia and the hyperactive, verbose rock critic Lester Bangs in Almost Famous, it would be a wonder if there are any roles that Hoffman could not convincingly create.

In Ada’s story and, perhaps, the film altogether, Renee Zellweger not only steals the scene from every other actor with whom she shares screen time, but also continues to establish herself as, for lack of a better phrase, a serious actor. At first only playing love interest to a variety of leading men in, most notably, Jerry Maguire, and most forgettably, The Bachelor, Zellweger, in recent years, has been gradually justifying her position on Hollywood’s A-List with versatile turns in Nurse Betty, Bridget Jones’ Diary, and last year’s Chicago. Ruby Thewes, a once-abandoned mountain girl who speaks coarsely about male/female relationships, decapitates temperamental roosters, and stomps around whenever she walks, while, at the same time, virtually swoons as Ada reads her passages from Wuthering Heights, is Zellweger’s most unique characterization yet. In a movie year somewhat lacking in strong roles for women, Zellweger takes Ruby, a practitioner of tough love, and creates one of the year’s most memorable film creations- period.

Visually, the film shares little in common with other Civil War epics, such as Gone with the Wind or the recent, bloated Gods and Generals. From the opening battle in which black gun powder and gushing blood cover the pit of men fighting to the death, presenting an image equal to any Dante must have envisioned in the Inferno, to the grungy hospital where Inman lies, covered in flies, awaiting treatment, Minghella gives us a vision of the Civil War that is more blood-soaked and less valiant than other films of its kind have imagined.

Surprisingly, however, although the film plays out as drama, rather than filled with scenes of gunplay, the visuals of Cold Mountain often recall 1970s westerns, rather than cinematic visions of the Old South that viewers have become accustomed to. This is especially so in the film’s final chapter as Teague and his cohorts attempt to drive Ada and friends from Black Cove, her home, and pursue her up into the snowy mountains of North Carolina. The desolate and starkly beautiful snow covered backdrops where Inman’s odyssey and Ada’s struggle with Teague come to fruition are reminiscent of the wintry backwoods of Jeremiah Johnson and the freezing mountain towns of McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Minghella creates an intriguing contrast between the deaths in the film, from the mass graves that occur in the opening battle to the sad, solitary deaths in the bleak mountains at the film’s climax.

In many ways, Cold Mountain is a typical and atypical example of the Hollywood machine’s product. It has been released on Christmas Day in an obvious attempt at nabbing several major prizes in the upcoming awards season. It is littered with high profile actors, as well as a tremendous supporting cast. The film has been advertised in a format that Miramax hopes will appeal to both men and women by stressing aspects that the company thinks will attract all audiences in a gender stereotyped manner- the men will come to see a war film and the women a love story. But Minghella’s film takes the route less traveled and joins the scant company of recent ambitious big budget Miramax period pictures that also include Gangs of New York and Chicago, films that use the studio system (or, at least, its money) in order to craft expensive art films that often paint significant moments in American history as characterized by bloodlust, hatred, and foolhardiness. The director has also now, perhaps, cornered the market on noteworthy cinematic companion pieces to acclaimed novels on which they were based- first Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, then Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, and now this.

Cold Mountain is not perfect- some of the comic relief saps the potential out of several dramatically sound scenes; both Inman, traveling a hard journey from the hospital to his home, and Ada, toiling to keep her farm intact, never seeming to be in anything less than chic dress; and characters are divided into simple categories, namely the good (those who help Inman survive the journey and Ada survive the death of her father) and the bad (those who interfere with the two characters). However, it is an ambitious film about the lasting effects of war on the human spirit, a theme that has been seemingly played to death, but feels fresh here, and a love story amidst a ravaged, blood-soaked defeated South. The film’s end, which I will not give away, in the spirit of Frazier’s novel, celebrates small triumphs and human resiliency amidst massive defeats in the lives of the story’s characters.