Cold Mountain

Cold Mountain is a successful adaptation of Charles Frazier's award-winning novel. That is quite an achievement considering that the novel's story, with its episodic style and many static passages, hardly seems suited to the screen.

In terms of genre the film is a slightly curious mixture of equal parts war film and love story. Jude Law does what he can, but his refined features certainly do not suit the role of the taciturn, tough Southern craftsman Inman, who falls in love with the refined and enchanting minister's daughter Ada Monroe from the city.

Ada and Inman's happiness is short-lived when the Civil War between the North and the South breaks out. Inman reluctantly goes off to war, where he fights bravely, but in the end the bloody pointlessness of war becomes too much for him and his longing for Ada so great that he deserts. Now the actual plot begins: Inman's long, gruelling trek back to Cold Mountain in North Carolina.

In parallel with Inman's strange experiences on his way, we follow Ada's tribulations. After her father's death she is on the brink of despair, as she has not been brought up to fend for herself. Fortunately the eccentric loner Ruby Thewes offers her services, and apart from their tormentor, the militia leader Teague, things are not so bad after all. Meanwhile Ada waits longingly for a sign of life from Inman.

Anthony Minghella is a master of grand melodrama, but it never becomes quite as gripping and emotionally charged as in "The English Patient", perhaps because Ada and Inman's great love never becomes truly convincing.