Cold Mountain film review

certificate_15

COLD MOUNTAIN

Charles Frazier's best-selling Civil War epic always seemed destined for the big screen. Pitching a love story in the middle of America's most important internal conflict, Frazier eschewed political commentary and concentrated on the struggle of two lovers separated by a war that tore their country apart. While the book was sometimes criticised for being too slow and predictable it undoubtedly contained a number of memorable images. Step forward the master of the modern epic, Anthony Minghella, to turn a decent original story into a formidable and hugely memorable masterpiece.

No stranger to the romantic epic, Minghella directed the hugely popular The English Patient before coming unstuck with the meandering and leaden The Talented Mr Ripley. But here he is back to his very best with a film that evokes the great David Lean.

The film opens with a brutal battle sequence that is Saving Private Ryan's beach landing set in the trenches of a Yankees/Confederate standoff. At the centre of the destruction is Inman (Jude Law), a young soldier defending the South with many of the men from his town. While his comrades are killed, Inman clings to his only hope, an escape and return to Cold Mountain to his true love Ada (Nicole Kidman) whose picture he grasps as much as to life itself. He deserts and begins a thousand-mile journey on foot, made treacherous by the presence of soldiers of both sides baying for the blood of fighters who have left the conflict.

Minghella, alongside veteran editor Walter Murch (whose credits go back to The Godfather and Apocalypse Now), chooses to jump backwards and forwards in the story to show us how Inman and Ada met and the effect the war has on both. While Inman encounters a number of desperate characters on his journey (including a philandering priest played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Nathalie Portman as a desperate young widow and an unrecognisable Eileen Atkins as a mystical wood dweller), Ada struggles to cope with the death of her father (Donald Sutherland), her inability to survive on her own and the menace of the local baddie Teague (Ray Winstone) and his gang of ne'er-do-wells.