The key to making an on-screen romance believable is developing chemistry between the pair of actors that are supposed to be attracted to one another. Cold Mountain, the new big-budget historical romance from director Anthony Minghella, fails to set-up any attraction at all between its principal actors and ends up being one of the year’s biggest disappointments.
Ada Monroe (Nicole Kidman) has accompanied her father from Charleston to the little town of Cold Mountain, North Carolina. She is strikingly beautiful when compared with the mostly older women of the town and attracts a lot of attention from the male populace. One laborer, Inman (Jude Law), is especially interested. After some prodding from a lady friend, Ada goes up to talk to him but finds he’s a man of few words. After a few awkward encounters between the two, Inman is sent off to join the Civil War as a Confederate soldier. Ada promises to wait for his return.
While he’s gone, Ada writes numerous letters to him and encounters hardship on the farm. Her father dies and leaves her with a large stretch of land to tend to and she possesses no farming skills. Help comes in the form of Ruby (Renee Zellweger), a spunky girl from town who assists Ada by teaching her the ways of farming, cooking and, basically, surviving.
Inman, however, is fighting hard for the Confederates. After a particularly brutal Yankee attack, he is injured in the neck. While recuperating, he receives one of Ada’s letters that describes the hardships she is facing. He decides he’s had enough fighting and decides to desert the Army. So, off he goes, avoiding Yankee patrols, home guard divisions looking for deserters, and the hazards of the wild woods of North Carolina.
All this would be easier to swallow if there was a strong romantic bond between Ada and Inman but the two say approximately three sentences to each other before he goes off to war. It’d be one thing if she were waiting for him to come back from a semester at college but three years on the battlefield? After one kiss and a little bit of physical attraction?
There are some of good things in Cold Mountain, especially Renee Zellweger’s lively performance as Ruby and the always reliable Philip Seymour Hoffman as a defrocked reverend, but overall it’s all flash and no bang.
2.0 out of 5.0 stars
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