Cold Mountain (2003) Review

For decades, Hollywood has toyed with the idea of remaking or following up Gone With The Wind. That moment has finally arrived.

Jude Law in Cold Mountain (2003) (Courtesy of IMDB)

Times have certainly changed since Victor Fleming, with uncredited help from directors Sam Wood and George Cukor, brought Margaret Mitchell's celebrated Civil War era novel to the big screen in 1939. While Gone with the Wind's virile male lead, Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), quite famously didn't give a damn, the sensitive lead character of Charles Frazier's bestseller Cold Mountain, Inman, gives more of a damn about love than any of his Confederate brethren.

As his name suggests, Inman is a tortured, sensitive soul, focused inward to begin with and only more so once he witnesses the horrors of the Civil War first hand. Although he has but a few brief chaste encounters with Ada Monroe (Nicole Kidman), a prim and proper gal from Charlotte, North Carolina who relocates to the Virginia countryside because of the ailing health of her father (Donald Sutherland), a preacher, she burns a hole in his heart so deep that he eventually is willing to risk death by deserting the cause and trekking back home to find her.

While some cynics have referred to writer-director Anthony Minghella's adaptation of Cold Mountain as The American Patient for its surface resemblance to his Academy Award winning 1996 epic The English Patient, it is in fact much more than that - a sweeping and marvelously romantic Gone With The Wind for our times. Minghella and his team of casting directors - David Rubin (The Talented Mr. Ripley), Ronna Kress (Pirates of the Caribbean) and Michelle Guish (Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason) - deserve full credit for enlisting Jude Law to play their kinder, gentler version of Rhett Butler. It's hard to imagine another actor, American or British, who could have so forcefully embodied Inman's transforming itinerary of war, misery and compassion.

Law, whose performance in Cold Mountain is the first half of an international stardom one-two punch to be followed by next summer's remake of Alfie, sparks genuine chemistry with his leading lady Kidman. Taller than Ewan McGregor (Moulin Rouge), better looking than Ben Chaplin (Birthday Girl) and more soulful than Tom Cruise (Eyes Wide Shut), the 30-year-old Brit finally has a female foil instead of recent male counterparts such as Tom Hanks, Haley Joel Osment and Ed Harris.

While Scarlett O'Hara counted on the assistance of a subservient black slave, Mammy (Oscar winning Hattie McDaniel), the woman at Ada's side is, fittingly for today's more sophisticated audiences, a fiercely independent white woman, Ruby Thewes (Renee Zellweger). Her arrival midway through the film provides great moments of comic relief and turns a pair of stranded souls into surrogate sisters. Their odd coupling is also a powerful reminder of how women must pull together whenever the men in their lives take to foolhardy quarrelling.

Nicole Kidman in Cold Mountain (2003) (Courtesy of IMDB)

Few directors have a better handle on the pacing and dramatic structure of intertwined parallel stories than Minghella. Much like he did in The English Patient, the twin tales of Inman's wartime struggles and Ada's increasing isolation exist in perfect harmony, with a seamless ebb and flow between their dislocated points of view. By keeping his two lead characters in constant contact through Kidman's voiceovers of her letters to him, Law's telltale clutching of that same pack of tattered correspondence and an early, subtle use of flashbacks, it never feels like two stories. Just one epic romantic tale.

Another intriguing difference between Gone With The Wind and Cold Mountain is the fact that whereas the former holds its major disaster moment, the burning of Atlanta, in check until its later stages, Minghella gets the big wartime moment out of the way in the very first scene. Why? Because whereas the Mitchell saga is an epic with an emphasis on history, Minghella's treatment of Frazier's novel is more interested in bringing romance to the forefront.

It's everywhere in the film: a mother (Natalie Portman) watching over her baby; a neer-do-well father (Ray Winstone) devoted to his daughter; a pastor (Sutherland) in league with the Lord; and so on. But Minghella's film never preaches. Rather, it sheds light on the absurdity of war through its glimpses of the instincts of the fairer sex.

Back in 1939, Gone With The Wind won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Director and Screenplay. Today, Cold Mountain is nominated for eight Golden Globes, has topped many of this year's critics polls and is being hyped as a leading Oscar contender. Is Margaret Mitchell's book better than the one by Charles Frazier? Does Nicole Kidman match the febricity of Vivien Leigh? Would Rhett Butler triumph over Inman in a duel among the Southeast's towering pine trees?

It's hard to say. But since Gone with the Wind would have taken in a billion dollars at the box office today if its receipts were adjusted for inflation, Cold Mountain still has a ways to go before it measures up objectively to David O. Selznick's masterpiece. However, as far as this reviewer is concerned, it already has.