Tuesday, April 26, 2011


Cold Mountain

I watched Cold Mountain the other day. It's one of these films that kind of snuck up on my netflix queue. Once upon a time, in the early days of having netflix, I made a fairly long queue of random movies I was vaguely interested in seeing for one reason or another, and I hit "add" to just about any movie Netflix recommended that held any interest. As time went by, I found myself largely ignoring most of this list, and picking out movies I really wanted to see as I went; generally once I send a movie away, I find a movie on my list to move into the first position. A couple of weeks ago maybe, I sent a movie away, and fresh off the death of Elizabeth Taylor, I picked Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf to be my next film. Yet, the next day, I get an e-mail telling me Cold Mountain is coming - bullshit, I thought, naturally - sneakily enough Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf had a wait, pushing the second position movie into first. Anyway, so I had it, it won an Oscar, might as well watch it, I figured.

I told my friend that I had seen the movie, and he asked me, something along the lines of, "was it exactly what I expect it to be?" After which, I thought for a second, and replied affirmatively. After thinking about it some more, there isn't a much better way to describe the movie if you know anything about it - it's a big, long, romantic, star-studded Civil War epic (Jude Law and Nicole Kidman play the leads, with Renee Zellweger winning an Oscar for Supporting Role) about a guy trying to get back to his love in the South vaguely based on the Odyssey and all about terrible toll of war (not a lot of war movies endorsing war these days). Take a moment to think about that in film form, and I would wager that what you're thinking is just about what the movie is.

What I didn't realize is that the film is positively loaded with acting talent - four academy award winners - Nicole Kidman (The Hours), Natalie Portman (Black Swan), Phillip Seymour Hoffman (Capote) and Renee Zellweger (none other than Cold Mountain). After that, only one other nominee, Jude Law, nominated for Cold Mountain as well as for The Talented Mr. Ripley, appears, but plenty of other actors of note, who, because of the journey format of the story often come into the film for just a couple of minutes - Giovanni Ribisi pops up for about five minutes, Jena Malone and Cillian Murphy are in the movie for what has to be a couple of minutes at most and Emily Deschanel and James Rebhorn are on screen for a matter of seconds. It also contains Jack White's only real acting role (Elvis Presley in Walk Hard barely counts, I suppose).

Lastly, is it wrong, that as a northerner, I always route against the southern soldiers in these films even when they're supposed to be the good guys? I mean I'm not going so far as to root for the northern soldiers who (spoiler!) try to rape Natalie Portman, but still in the battle scenes, death to the South! Nice try of all these southern stories to try to make heroes who were southern but don't have slaves - as long as they wear that rebel grey, to hell with them.

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