Starring: Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Renée Zellweger

6 out of 10 stars

To paraphrase Dennis Miller, let's watch and see if Harvey Weinstein can Fitzcarraldo Cold Mountain to the Academy Awards.

In a year of depressing and enervating movies, Cold Mountain succeeds in being the most wearying and the least redemptive (though House of Sand and Fog gives it a good run for its money). That's not entirely the film's fault; Cold Mountain was frustrating and depressing as a book first.

What the film is missing, however, is author Charles Frazier's prose, which injected metaphors and crafted language in such a rare and delicate fashion that it tended to beguile us with its beauty in the midst of the horrific proceedings that made up its narrative. In the hands of adapter/director Anthony Minghella there is never a moment, from the excellent acting, to the quite-brilliant cinematography, to the editing, that gives us an equivalent and convincingly assuages the anguish we've experienced. It digs a fine and proper hole and can't pull itself out of it. Things are, initially, looking up for W.P. Inman (Jude Law). Though he's quiet and reserved, he's enjoying a newfound love with preacher's daughter Ada Monroe, a recent arrival to the North Carolina town of Cold Mountain. Ada (Nicole Kidman, much better cast here than in The Human Stain) has moved with her father, Reverend Monroe (Donald Sutherland), so he can benefit from the salubrious condition of the air and country living. Their brief courtship is interrupted, however, by the outbreak of the Civil War, and Inman signs up for the Confederacy. Shortly after Inman leaves, Ada's father dies and Ada, a creature brought up to a refined and genteel lifestyle, is entirely at a loss as to how to run a farm. Facing starvation and possibly madness, she's relieved by the appearance of Ruby (Renee Zellweger, in top form), a working girl who has had a hardscrabble existence, mostly at the hands of her hard-drinking father, Stobrod (Brendon Gleason).

Meanwhile, Inman has spent three years fighting for Jefferson Davis. Badly wounded in the throat during the siege of Petersburg, VA, and dehumanized by years of warfare, Inman single-mindedly heads home to Ada, knowing that the Home Guard, a band of deputized, but entirely lawless, bounty hunters are on the look-out for deserters. Along the way he encounters all manner of humanity. He stops a fallen preacher, Veasey (Philip Seymour Hoffman) from murdering a black woman he's impregnated, becoming chained to him literally and figuratively later on. Another near brush with death is averted when Inman is rescued by an old woman who has shunned society for goats and leads an uncomplicated life in the mountains. He also stumbles into the home of a war widow named Sara (Natalie Portman) who has a sick baby. They enjoy a brief, bittersweet moment of humanity, until the starving Union troops arrive.

The sequence with Sara is instructive. What happens to Minghella's Sara is actually much worse than what happens in the book though, as a whole, Frazier's continual string of tragedies, deprivations, and cruelties outweighs what happens outside and inside that log cabin home. But, much like Ron Howard's mouthful of dirt, The Missing, the scene so turns the audience's head in disgust that it never regains the trust necessary to look back. Unlike Gone with the Wind, which rarely troubled our heads with notions of real war amidst its gauzy romance and thrust, Cold Mountain dares to do that. But it does not enjoy the same noble result, say, of Saving Private Ryan, or Glory or Welcome to Sarajevo.

Though it shares the pacing of Minghella's The English Patient, Cold Mountain owes much of its allegiance to Minghella's little-watched, but damn fine Jim Henson "Storyteller" series, which retold lost medieval folk tales. The black crows that swarm around a vision that Ada sees looking in a mirror down a well are kin to the ravens from "The Three Ravens" and the opening of each show. Minghella is conjuring the cold specter of folklore once again, this time American, like a stock soup. But the images do not warm. They do not end with comfort or even better understanding, and Cold Mountain comes off as inserts of Matthew Brady photos in the glossy pages of Vanity Fair. And there's something oddly disturbing about that. It's almost blasphemous.

If Weinstein can haul this sodden, though well laid-out, carcass to a Best Picture nomination, then Miramax has so infiltrated the awards process that the whole system demands reconsideration. That it leads the nominations for the dubious Golden Globes is just a hint of how handily Weinstein's company manipulates the back-patting season already.