Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain is a mountain achievment.

                Cold Mountain is a bold and transforming movie.  Directed by Anthony Minghella and winning multiple awards including Renée Zellweger for Best Actress in a supporting Role, the movie encompasses both passion and anguish, warmth and coldness, hatred and yet love.  The film is developed in a southern town of Cold Mountain, where we see the beginning of the civil war take its toll to the end.  The audience is shown the hardships of the war through a long lost love of a woman and of a man who is sent off to the war.  The most renowned southern war movie I would argue is Gone with the Wind directed by Victor Fleming.  In that production, we feel remorse for the southern states and the plantations in which we see the slaves work on.  In Cold Mountain, I relived some of those same feelings that I were evoked in me while watching Scarlett and Rhett’s tragic love.  I would never say that Cold Mountain was just as well done as Gone with the Wind.  However, stars Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Renée Zellweger, and Philip Seymour Hoffman add a depth to the film that takes on a similar yet strangely different turn than Gone with the Wind did.  The film jumps back and forth through time, showing the audience the blooming love between Nicole Kidman and Jude Law and traveling forward to where we see Jude Law deserting the military in hopes of reaching his love; neither know what became of the other due to lost correspondence and lapse in time by three years.  Both go through unmanageable hardships that we see unravel during the film. 

           

     At first, the film did not catch my attention.  If I am being honest, I turned the movie off after ten minutes and decided to watch something else.  However, I gave another shot at the movie, due to the fact that Renée Zellweger was supposedly Oscar worthy of the role she played.  The second time I watched it, I not only loved it, but I thought that Ms. Zellweger made the movie.  All actors were wonderful in the movie and all added something to the film that couldn’t be picked up by another star in the film, but when I watched Renée Zellweger, I didn’t see Brigit Jones or Roxie Hart.  I didn’t even see the quiet girl that I witnessed in Jerry Maguire.  I actually saw the opposite; I saw a strong, independent, witty, “one of the boys” kind of girl.  She was rugged and tough and southern. 

                The movie surprised me to say the least.  A movie I found full of tragedy, darkness, and murder was a contradiction, holding also hope, lightness, and purity.  I gave the movie four stars and would gladly watch it again.  Now, though, I want to watch Gone with the Wind, so maybe after.