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Cold Mountain Movie Review

Cold Mountain is a 2003 epic war film directed by Anthony Minghella and starring Nicole Kidman, Jude Law and Renee Zellweger. It is a very well made, but flawed movie.

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“Every piece of this is man’s bullshit.

They call this war “a cloud over the land”,

but they made the weather and then they stand

in the rain and say “Shit, it’s rainin’!“

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A wounded Confederate soldier named Inman deserts his unit and travels across the South, aiming to return to his young wife, Ada, who he left behind to tend their farm. As Inman makes his perilous journey home, Ada struggles to keep their home intact with the assistance of Ruby, a mysterious drifter sent to help her by a kindly neighbor. Based on a book and being in the epic romance war genre, this movie was obviously meant to be another big Oscar contender after ‘The English Patient’, but that never quite materialized due to the movie’s numerous flaws.

While I am also not the biggest fan of the aforementioned film, it was the better of the two when all is said and done. The problem with this story is that it’s meant to be a romance at its core, but it cannot really be one when the main characters are separated throughout the majority of the runtime. The sex scene at the end of the movie is memorable for sure, but they should have included more romantic sequences to make this pairing really click.

The rest of the movie focuses on the characters’ differing paths, each hard in their own right. The guy is fighting while the girl is tending the farm. The latter scenes were more engaging than the former as the female characters were better developed than their male counterparts. The war scenes were somewhat poorly filmed and too dark while the farm scenes were both more enjoyable and more genuinely engaging.

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Jude Law is solid in this role, though it’s far from his best performances. Renee Zellweger won an Oscar for her very comedic at first, but eventually quite moving turn as the sidekick Ruby. The dynamic between the two women is the emotional core of the movie. Nicole Kidman is also terrific and her character is very well developed. Cold Mountain is also wonderfully scored, solidly shot outside of the war scenes and it featured strong dialogue, but the editing, pacing and directing left a lot to be desired. It needed a stronger, more streamlined script. It never managed to compare to ‘Gone with the Wind’, which it clearly tried to emulate.