O brother
Civil War odyssey gets the Cold shoulder
The Coen Brothers beat Anthony Minghella to the punch. Minghella’s Cold Mountain, based on Charles Frazier’s novel, reimagines The Odyssey in the American South during the Civil War. But the film comes a few years after the Coens sent Everett Ulysses McGill on his own journey through the South during the Great Depression.
O Brother reveled in rural stereotypes and roots music, and Cold Mountain features “old-timey” songs as well. Minghella strives to explore weightier themes about love and war, but Cold Mountain’s sizable talents never connect to its grand ideas, making its disappointment all the bigger.
It begins with a genuinely Homeric battle scene. Inman (Jude Law), a soft-spoken farmer turned Confederate soldier, witnesses an apocalyptic Union attack in which the ground itself erupts, blowing a shirt literally off the back of a comrade. The Yankees charge through billowing dust-clouds, but the ambush turns into a bloodbath of bayonets against bare flesh.
When Inman recovers from a war wound, he receives a long-delayed letter from Ada (Nicole Kidman), his sweetheart back at Cold Mountain. They’ve scarcely exchanged more than a dozen sentences and a single kiss, but when Ada asks him to return, Inman abandons the war. It’s a fraught journey home, with Yankees treating him as an enemy, and Johnny Reb pursuing him as a deserter.
Inman and Ada’s long-distance longing should feel like the stuff of opera or epic poetry, but it never catches fire. Law’s eyes convey the wariness of a man who’s seen too much, but he’s so taciturn that Inman frequently seems not deep but dull. Kidman looks glamorous no matter how bedraggled Ada becomes, and she falls back on an actorly self-consciousness that marked her roles before The Hours. She also hasn’t mastered the Southern accent, asking, “Did you get my lettuce?” when referring to her letters.
As the “Penelope” character, Ada faces unique challenges on the home front. In a flashback to her arrival at Cold Mountain, she’s the picture of gentility, and an onlooker declares, “That’s a real Southern belle,” in case we forgot which side of the Mason-Dixon line we’re on. But Ada’s unable to fend for herself during wartime deprivations, and even the household rooster bullies her.
Rescue comes from a less educated but fiercely independent local gal called Ruby (Renee Zellweger), who “larns” Ada some self-sufficiency. After Inman and Ada’s humorless nobility, Ruby brings some refreshing pungency to the film. The role positions Zellweger to win next year’s Best Supporting Actress Academy Award, but even though she’s vividly spunky, her acting is sometimes as broad as the broad side of a barn.
Through the entire movie, Minghella searches for the proper tone. His previous films had an artful detachment that suited the wounded souls of The English Patient and the predatory envy of The Talented Mr. Ripley. Here Inman endures quasi-mythic exploits, from being chained to corpses on a hilltop to running afoul of duplicitous “sirens” (including Atlanta’s Jen Apgar), but the sequences seldom prove stylistically imaginative.
In Cold Mountain’s finest moments, Inman finds shelter with a grieving war widow portrayed by Natalie Portman. If the entire film had contained the scene’s measures of grief, urgency and precise detail, it could have been a wrenching masterpiece. But when Cold Mountain wants to engage the audience, it resorts to such cheap manipulation as brutal threats against a kindly old lady and a sick (!) infant.
The film represents how the war transformed the Southern states (represented by Ada) from antebellum aristocracy to a practical economy, yet its concept of the South never feels authentic. That might not be surprising, since its English writer-director shot the film in Romania with an Australian leading lady and an English hero and villains. Cold Mountain may have been lost before it even embarked on its travels.