They call this war a cloud over the land, but they made the weather. Ruby: “Every piece of this is man’s bullshit. We could lay him in the dirt and grow another one, just like him.” Ruby, about her dad: “He is so full of manure, that man. Ruby: “My daddy, he’d walk 40 miles for liquor and not 40 inches for kindness.” I know your name.” She breaks the rooster’s neck, then beheads it. Rudy: “I despise a flogging rooster.” She walks over to the rooster. Every time I got near him, he’s at me with his spurs. Cause there ain’t no man around who ain’t old or full of mischief.”Īda: “There’s the rooster. So, now, I say to you, plain as I can: If you are fighting, stop fighting. Jack White as Georgia in Cold Mountain (2003)Īda in a letter to Inman: “I find myself alone and at the end of my wits … My last thread of courage now is to put my faith in you. He’s not above using the war to try to get it back. His family owned most of the land around Cold Mountain at one point. It’s the Home Guard under the command of a vicious man named Teague. Meanwhile, the biggest problem lurking on Cold Mountain isn’t Union troops. Come home.Īfter being seriously wounded after the Battle of the Crater, he attempts to do just that.įortunately, reinforcements have already arrived at the Monroe home in the form of Ruby Thewes (Renee Zellweger), a hardened young woman who plans to help Ada take care of herself. He’s so attracted to her that he’s far less jubilant than his comrades when war breaks out.įour years later, he’s stuck in the trenches outside Petersburg.Īda is still on Cold Mountain, struggling to survive now that her father has died. He’s a man who’s clumsy around her.īut the attraction is mutual. She feels an almost immediate attraction to a young man named Inman (Jude Law), Of course, by design, fairy tales lack the desert heat and fiery passion that helped The English Patient connect with a wide audience (the central affair is, by comparison, rather cold) and it's safe to say Minghella never quite wrestles his part-odyssey, part-survival story structure into submission, but his journey boasts enough wonders to woo even the most jaded critic.Nicole Kidman is Ada Monroe, a Southern belle, who follows her ill preacher of a father from Charleston to the small community of Cold Mountain, North Carolina, where the clean country air is supposed to be better for his health. Kidman's porcelain beauty, Renée Zellweger's spikey sidekick, Jude Law's distant hero – all the elements that so annoyed more acerbic critics are valuable ingredients of a fairy tale, and it is only within this context that the delicate love story blossoms, detached from the harsh realism of the world in which it plays. The love between Inman and Ada is that of a folk tale the two have barely met, yet during their separation each wields the memory of the other as a weapon in their own personal battles, their affection serving as salvation from their circumstances, rather than recalling a longing for times past.So too the main narrative structure, employed by every scribe from Homer to Hartman (Phil, in Pee-Weeís Big Adventure!), which sees the hero's journey punctured by encounters that act as their own self-contained fables. This epic canvas might not inspire the Academy – he has done it all before – but it lets Minghella adapt another poetically composed novel, where the plot is of less importance than an immersion in the landscapes and the characters' inner conflicts. It revels in its deliberate delicacy, painting gnarled characters against a vast, snowy backdrop framed by menacing mountains. That, however, should not really matter: Minghella's movie – a soft-yet-savage folk tale – is, in fact, so self-congratulatory it should be able to survive without plaudits from other quarters. Alas for Miramax, the only shoulder offered by Oscar was as cold as the film's mountain. Like The English Patient and Lasse Hallström brace The Cider House Rules and Chocolat, Cold Mountain emerged from Weinstein's production line primed to tap on Oscar's shoulder, brimming with literary pedigree, lavish scenery, weighty emotions and an eminent cast. Here, the director's casualty of wartime love is Inman (Jude Law), a Confederate deserter who's travelling home to his love, Ada (Nicole Kidman), whom – this being a distinguished Miramax literary adaptation – he has never really known. Well, Minghella was at it again last year, chiding those who are neither patient, nor, in this case, American those unable to endure the ponderous, painful roads down which his characters invariably wander. So said Joe Queenan, as he delivered his pithy proscription on director Anthony Minghellaís multiple Oscar-winner. The problem with The English Patient is that to enjoy it, you have to be either English or patient.
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