Movie Reviews: Cold Mountain

Cold Mountain (2003)

This movie was pretty much a yawner. It moved slow enough to make it seem interesting and the director/writer did a good job of making you think that something was actually going to happen at any moment. I’m still waiting. Nicole Kidman is pretty enough to keep my attention for ten minutes, but not for two and a half hours, and if it weren’t for Renee Zellweger constantly setting off flashbacks of the totally hot lesbian chick from ‘Chasing Amy’, I would have retrieved the remote from under the couch and switched back to watching televangelists and infomercials. Yeah, you guessed it. I didn’t like this movie. Ok. There were parts I did like, but not many.

Maybe it’s just me, but I see something wrong with the whole picture here. Follow along for a minute. This film was a horror, errrrr love story set in the Civil War South. The leads were played by an Englishman, an Australian, another Englishman, and the lesbian chick from ‘Chasing Amy.’ Maybe I’m just a stickler for authenticity, but if you listened carefully, you could hear the actors’ native accents slipping through into the dialogue. I was sure that Nicole and the lesbian chick from ‘Chasing Amy’ were going to get it on during the bedtime literary fest on that huge bed, but no such luck. The red-haired Preacher with ‘Biblical Bowel Syndrome’ and the overabundance of Viagra in his system was the life of the party. It was also nice that they gave a small role to the little brother of the fat guy from the Dave Matthews Band, and I’m extra thankful there was none of their music in this film. Thank you, Santa.

I like realism and historical accuracy in a movie. One of the historically accurate parts of this film was probably missed by those less knowledgeable in Antebellum Southern History. Southerners were actually better educated on average than their Northern counterparts, and Oxford English was the language of the South. There were literary references in the dialogue, and ways of speaking not heard south of the Mason-Dixon since the ‘Dukes of Hazard’ was popular. That level of English changed somewhat after the Civil War with the Reconstruction. The soundtrack, believe it or not, was excellent, and this movie would have been a lot better had there been more Southern folk music. I love that stuff. (It’s what made “Brother, Where Art Thou” a thoroughly entertaining film.) The brutality and raw injustice depicted were very stark and almost ironic in nature. The battle scenes were well done, too. Watching it was painful enough. I can’t imagine volunteering to live it. The scene with the photos of the dead soldiers tacked onto the door was very realistic.

On the other hand, most of this film was cliché after cliché. Man loves woman who appears to be above his social class. She secretly loves him but is afraid to pursue. He leaves to a war he doesn’t want and she waits for him, even though he might be already dead. A nasty bad man wants her and the farm for himself, she resists. She has no skill for farming, her mother died when she was born, her father is a preacher with a bad ticker who dies reading a Bible in the rain, and the magical lesbian chick from ‘Chasing Amy’ appears out of nowhere to rebuild the farm and save this film from being completely redundant. The hero is wounded, lost, disillusioned, on the run, and manages to find a kindly old gypsy witch living in the middle of who-knows-where to nurse him back to health (I bet there were millions of them back in day.) Our hero ends up in one predicament after another, dodging both bullets and vaginas hurled at him along his trek home. The hero finally returns to the dreamy heroine, they make one night of passionate love, he shows up unexpectedly to kill the bad guys, and dies himself in the process. (Pass me a Kleenex and a box of chocolate. I’m going to need a bubble-bath to get over this one.) AND, as luck would have it, their one and only night of long anticipated coitus produces offspring. Call me crazy, but I thought that only happened with women a guy DOESN’T like.

If you have an afternoon when you’re not feeling particularly suicidal, or your favorite shows are cancelled for a ‘Best of Police Chases XXV” marathon, I think this is worth sacrificing a few hours for. Let me know what you think!

Disclaimer: These reviews are the sole opinion of the reviewer when sober and do not reflect the opinions of the reviewer when he is smoking marijuana or drinking whiskey. All reviews of my reviews will be subject to review based on an arbitrary review process currently under review by the Special Review Committee for Reviewing Reviews.