Cold war

I don’t know if Anthony Minghella qualifies as a great director yet, but Cold Mountain further confirms an impression that’s been building cumulatively in his earlier work (The English Patient, but also Truly, Madly, Deeply and The Talented Mr. Ripley). This is an admirably contemporary filmmaker, a director who has a real gift for concocting smart, zesty mixtures of the serious-minded art film in the High Anglo literary mode and the old-fashioned story-telling spectacle via Hollywood in its more prestige-oriented moments.

Cold Mountain has the prestige, certainly, of the Charles Frazier novel from which it is adapted, but also that of a patented blockbuster subject—love and war. And it has the big budget to support a lavishly detailed historical spectacle and a set of big stars and good actors, including one or two of whom are both.

The large-scale Civil War scenes early in the film suggest an epic of grand proportions, but much of the film is in fact a painfully picaresque journey through a Confederate South on the verge of full collapse. And because another great chunk of the film intercuts the travails of Inman (Jude Law), trekking homeward, with those of his beloved Ada (Nicole Kidman), back at what’s left of the titular home place, Cold Mountain is also a poignantly desperate love story in which the lovers are separated, with only the slenderest of hopes and memories to sustain them.

This cobbling-together of modes makes for some strain and disproportion in the overall form of the thing, but the erratically episodic nature of this film is vindicated by the sheer abundance and vitality of character and incident in all that. Its wobbling between period realism and historical romance would matter more in a film that didn’t have so many fascinating yarns to spin for us.

The best of its earthy storytelling doesn’t really settle in until Renee Zellweger’s Ruby, the rambunctious country gal who becomes Ada’s partner in post-war survival, enters the picture. Before that, there’s something rather coy and lightweight in the introductions of Ada and Inman, and Cold Mountain threatens to lapse into a cutesy version of the New Hollywood seriousness.

Kidman trails a mist of anachronistic glamour throughout the entire film, rather as if the film is determined to keep Gone With the Wind fans interested even as most of the story goes into something decidedly different from the adventures of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara.

But the true heart of the movie resides elsewhere—in Ruby’s scrappy dignity and her serendipitous relationship with her errant father (Brendan Gleeson), and of course in Inman’s assorted experiences, misadventures and otherwise.

There are also enough gunfights to fuel a good western of the "shoot ’em up" variety, and a vengeful Home Guard honcho (Ray Winstone) insures that a revenge story, with the usual retributional violence, will leave its mark as well. But even the most justified violence in this story tends to have tragic consequences, and that too is more strength than limitation in this uneven but richly engaging movie.