Cold Mountain: frigid romance

Nicole pouts, Jude emotes, Renée struts, and the dimensions of Cold Mountain pretty much end there. Cold Mountain has the dubious honor of being the most overhyped and underwhelming film of the year, narrowly edging Master and Commander on the strength of Nicole Kidman's indestructible hairdos. The fact that it has garnered eight Golden Globe nominations, the most of any movie this year, says more about the quality, or lack thereof, of the 2003 cinema season than it does about the merit of the film itself.

There's potential in the desolate landscapes, fragile violence, and acting talent of Cold Mountain. And buried underneath one-dimensional characters, gaping historical inaccuracies, and Jude Law's facial hair is a good movie, something of a mix between Gone With the Wind and The Odyssey. But director/screenwriter Anthony Minghella's (The English Patient) camera is curiously distant from both his characters and the time period, leaving behind a numb blahness that juxtaposes oddly with the supposed intensity of emotion echoing through the South and the hearts of the film's young lovers.

Our Odysseus is Inman (Jude Law), a reticent farmer from the rural North Carolina community of Cold Mountain who, on the eve of proclaiming his love to the beautiful southern belle Ada (Nicole Kidman), is whisked away to fight for the Confederate army.

The Battle of the Crater opens the film and stands as the centerpiece of Minghella's portrayal of war; all other battlefield conflict is absent from the film. But this single glimpse is powerful enough to carry the entire war on its back. On July 30, 1864, Union troops dug a tunnel under the southern defenses, filled it with explosives, and essentially blew up the entire Confederate camp. But they were overeager in their attack and were trapped in their own crater, while the surviving Confederates massacred them from above. In Cold Mountain, this scene is all mud and guts and glorious panic, with blood and sweat blending into a misty frenzy that elicits the perception of absolute Hell.

But the emotional intensity wanes as Inman decides to desert and make his way through the perilous South back to his beloved. Hot on his heels is the Home Guard, fanatic Southern loyalists out to shoot deserters. The Home Guard might be responsible for more deaths in this film than the beginning battle, a historical exaggeration in tune with Cold Mountain's continued inability to evoke the defeated Civil War South.

As Inman traverses the adverse, he meets a host of characters, almost all of whom eventually blur together in their uselessness and lack of interesting personality. We get very little sense of the desperation of the Confederate states during 1864, a time when their armies were being pushed back and slaughtered and their cities decimated. Where Mingella and the original book's author Charles Frazier could have presented a spectrum of Southerners from slave owners to Union supporters (whom we should find in rural North Carolina), they instead endlessly parade past Inman and the audience people who, at their most emotive, express a passing aversion to the Confederates.

One who does stand out is Philip Seymour Hoffman as Veasley, a defrocked preacher who, much to Inman's disgust, latches on to Inman for a short time. Hoffman is wickedly debauched and deliciously contemptible, displaying more charisma in his few moments of screentime than any of the three leads.

Back at the farm, Ada is helpless without the men folk to take of her. She finds salvation in the form of Ruby (Renée Zellweger), a drifter who makes her entrance by decapitating a rooster. Zellweger is the strongest lead, though her acting is mostly confined to a jerky swagger and a strong accent. As for Kidman, she simply looks too glamorous to be true. Even when Ruby finally gets Ada to get her hands dirty, Ada does so with her hair artfully disheveled and her skin fetchingly smeared with a few traces of dirt. Kidman seems uncomfortable with her accent, and her emotions are so subdued that at times they're almost undetectable.

Despite Inman's silent nature that prevents the audience from connecting to his character, Law and Kidman do manage to keep the audience invested in their romance. Maybe it's their ceaseless looks of endless longing or Ada's wishy-washy voiceovers, but we do care what happens in the end. There's simply not enough substance to their respective journey's to make it worth the wait.

Cold Mountain is rated R for violence and sexuality.