I had the most amazing movie experience watching COLD MOUNTAIN (2003). I expected to dislike the film, especially with my unfavorites Jude Law and Nicole Kidman in the central roles. Not that they are completely without talent, but I've heard enough about "the brilliant Jude Law", when I don't think he's all that brilliant, and Kidman strikes me as a bit of a cheap tart.
More egregiously, they went and cast an Englishman and an Aussie as American Southerners. I thought I'd struggle through somehow.
One hour into the movie I'd fallen asleep; all my worst fears confirmed. My friend wanted to leave. Which is exactly what a friend and I had done after suffering through twenty minutes of the director's THE ENGLISH PATIENT, which went on to prove "the emperor had no clothes" by winning nine Academy Awards, like some sort of BEN HUR.
Something about a fey Englishman "making love" long distance to a seemingly proper Aussie female, who spent ten years married to Hollywood's most closeted male, with an undefined conflict as backdrop, that was meant to be engaged in America's South, didn't translate too well to the screen.
Then something truly stunning happened: Renée Kathleen Zellweger, a "real" Southerner, came on-screen.
You may not consider Texas the South, but Texans certainly do (especially the women who all want desperately to be proper belles). Turns out her father's Swiss-born and her mother hails from Norway, but so much for the quibbling.
The movie took off from that point. In the remaining hour and a half it gradually became one of the best movies I've ever seen. I've never had such a cinematic experience. What a turnaround!
One key to it was certainly Ms. Zellweger's Oscar-quality performance as the tomboy Ruby Thewes, who's in a classically conflicted relationship with her drunken father. But I think, even more importantly, they had to sort out the good guys and the bad guys.
It's difficult in Hollywood these days to be politically correct with a Civil War film. There was a time when the South might be viewed as the "good guys". They were the underdogs, they had the most to lose, they maintained their honor in the face of the vicious Northern onslaught. Not no more. Can't have slaveholders presented in a sympathetic light, being as they were the ultimate in "oppressors".
The North, meanwhile, can't be portrayed as the "good guys" because they are the obvious aggressors here, the "oppressors" of the poorer and weaker South. And they were just plain mean. Plus they're all white males, and we all know what that signifies these days.
So that's what the muck in the first hour of the movie was about, an inability to distinguish between the good guys and the bad. But then the storytellers came up with an ingenious solution. The story came to revolve around a band of rag-tag Confederate soldiers whose job it was to round up, by ANY means fair or foul, their wayward deserting brethren in arms. Perfect! Now you have some really bad guys.
Law and Kidman started "showing up", too, filling in their roles, becoming first believable, then stellar as Southerners caught in this epic struggle.
I'm puzzled as to why Harvey Weinstein, head of Miramax Productions, an otherwise savvy movie producer, would leave such a soft hour in the movie.
Couldn't he see it was killing it? And why, with all the technology available to Hollywood today, don't they continue to edit the film through the first week or so of showings.
Had they done so they might have had a hit of classic proportions.
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