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Cold Mountain Customer Reviews (34 - 36 of 87 Reviews)

We have forgotten how to reason
This movie was terrible in so many ways.

1) Nicole Kidman is almost forty,but she plays a woman in her early to mid twenties(unconvincingly)

2)The setting for this film was supposedly in the South but, where are the slaves? Apparently this is the only Southern town where no one owns a slave.

3) Southern society was very structured and formal. Their women led very restricted lives-yet Nicole Kidman
1-Walks up to a man she hasn't been introduced to and
starts a conversation
2- Walks around town all by herself
3- (IN the scene where Inman visits her house during the
rain) Was intending to visit slave quarters by herself
4-wears trousers

4) Kidman's character is supposedly well educated but apparently is too stupid to know that she must work to eat.

5) Kidman's character falls in "love" with a man she has spent maybe 15 minutes with. Apparantly this is enough to sustain her for about four years.

6) A preacher is portrayed as a drunkard, a near murderer,
and a fornicator.

7) This is actually quite a political movie. It makes a very strong anti-war statement.Deserters are heroes, "home guard" people are evil.The only good people are the ones who hate war.

8) The three main actors,Kidman,Zellweger,and Law are all three way too old for the characters they play.

9) THe production design is infantile, and not believable.

10) This movie has a horrible ending, and aftwards, I wished I hadn't seen the movie.

I wouldn't reccomend this movie to anyone who still has the ability to reason. I find it very sad and scary that the book(which is even worse) and the film were wildly popular. We have forgotten how to use our minds, and to reason.


feels episodic; exists in parts, some of which are v. good
This movie exists purely in parts. It doesn't quite work for me as a whole (it felt REALLY long, gratuitous sex, a slow opening, and a storyline that I cared less and less about as the movie went on), but I enjoyed it. It is good but not great. But this movie is absolutely heartbreaking in some scenes, which moved me completely to tears.

Basically, the movie is about a confederate soldier Inman (Jude Law) who is tired of fighting in a war he doesn't believe in. He decides to return home to his love, Ada Monroe (Nicole Kidman), but Inman is hunted by the North ("yankees") and the South (who are killing deserters of war) alike. Of Nicole Kidman and Jude Law, it can be said that they are well-cast in their roles as Ada and Inman. They do have some chemistry and there are some beautiful scenes between them, and their performances are good, but not great. This is not intended as a criticism because I enjoyed their work (I thought they captured anguish and love.

I haven't read the book so I'm not entirely sure what I am saying is fair, but here are my criticisms: one, a really slow opening. It seemed to take an hour for Inman to finally start returning home to Ida. I thought the opening war scene was not very well done; too much shock value and too little emphasis on human emotions, brutality of war, etc. Two, gratuitous sex. There is just one bizarre sequence in the movie (is it in the book? I don't know...) where Inman and some corrupt priest end up in a brothel house. It's very disturbing and gratuitous. I find it rather unnecessary. (The love scenes between Inman and Ada are rather graphic but I can understand it since they are deeply in love and "Cold Mountain" is an intense love story.) This is definitely not a movie to take little kids to.

Now that I've gotten all my criticism out of the way, let me say that I also have a lot of praise for this movie. I said the movie exists entirely in parts and there are several, particularly the ones where the Southern men are hunting down Confederate soldiers who have deserted the war. There is one scene about a husband and wife hiding their two young boys in their home. There is another about two men playing instruments to the Southern men, while knowing they will be shot shortly after. These scenes are very beautiful.

I think high praise goes to Renee Zellweger for her funny, touching, and strong portrayal of Ruby, the woman that comes to help Ada on the farm. Zellweger is uproariously funny and coarse; she steals every single scene she's in. And she is also responsible for one of the more moving moments in the film, when she finds her badly wounded father in the snow, bleeding from a gunshot wound. But the gem of this movie is, without a doubt, Natalie Portman as a widowed mother with a young child. Portman's two short scenes are my favorite in the movie. I don't want to spoil this one for you but Portman's touching and memorable performance (in only 10 minutes of film) will bring you to tears. It's a very powerful moment...Although "Cold Mountain" has a lot of these moments, they don't quite work together as a whole. Still, it is an enjoyable effort and well worth the price of admission. 3.5/5

A disappointment!
I thought Anthony Minghella did a wonderful job with The English Patient (he deserved the Academy Award even though I would have liked Fargo to have won best picture). Anyway, his direction was good in the beginning but other elements really brought the film down by the end. Well the score was great. The costumes were good. Jude Law deserved his Oscar nom. Renee Zellweger was a little over the top, but she did deserve recognition for making the film partially enjoyable when she stole some scenes. However, Nicole Kidman was such a miscast. I thought if any actor can go from a great comedy/musical/tragedy role like Satine in "Moulin Rouge!" then go to a great interpretation of a literary figure like the one she did Virginia Woolf in "The Hours", then this should have been a breeze. Unfortunately, she was not credible in this role at all! I read the book beforehand (it's beautiful and merits its huge popularity among readers) but the movie did slip on the importance of Ada being a kind of an "odd girl out" trying to fit into two types of society in the Civil War South and ultimately failing until she meets Ruby. A previous reviewer said Natalie Portman should have been in the lead role. I think she really could have pulled it off just from watching her short presence in the film. Nicole would not have been a problem if she weren't in half the movie looking like a perfect Southern Belle the whole time. Moreover, was there supposed to be a love story? It was not there. I was mostly disappointed in Nicole. Had the casting in that aspect been better the whole film would have been, at least for me, more enjoyable.

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