I finally got off work early enough to see Anthony Minghella's adaptation of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain and still get to bed at a reasonable hour. All the same, by the end I felt like I had stayed up too long. For most of its 155-minute running time you wait for the shy carpenter-hero Inman (Jude Law) to foot it back from the Civil War battlefields he's deserted so that he can consummate his love for Ada (Nicole Kidman), the shy preacher's daughter he barely knows. The movie is crammed with characters and episodes and yet the unexpressed passion between Inman and Ada which is meant to give a surge to everything we see stifles it instead.

I think that's because Kidman is too recessive a screen personality to frontload a movie with smoldering, barely contained sexuality. (I felt that way about her in Gus Van Sant's To Die For (1995), too.) Her bloodlessness functions at times as delicacy here, especially in the awkward courtship scenes, but her acting always seems like play-acting to me. It's not entirely her fault: Inman and Ada need to be busting their britches for a taste of each other to sustain this eternal-yearning plot arc, but the characters are too well-behaved for that. As a result, these naturally cool stars don't generate much heat. Law is more skillful, but playing a taciturn character he has to do most of the heavy-lifting, emotionally speaking, with his eyes. He's improved a lot since his early pretty-boy days, but he's not a magician. In one scene we see him hauling a pile of corpses he's manacled to at the wrists, and that could be a metaphor for the way he ends up carrying this deadweight movie.

The more basic problem is that although such repression would have been expected of young ladies and men in the 1860s, it doesn't really speak to us today (when we have the opposite problem--too much experience too soon). And since the movie fails pretty badly to recreate the place and era the love story feels pointlessly drawn-out. The failures of historical recreation include a chorus of flat, inconsistent Southern accents; Kidman's figure, make-up, and her feminist complaint about how her upbringing has left her unable to cope with the hardships of the war years; the anti-war sentiment; some of the sensitivity to the peripheral black characters; another character's therapeutic outbursts about her father's abuse and abandonment of her; the colloquial language, such as the use of the slang term "asshole," which the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang says was first used in 1935--props to the New York Public Library's Ask Librarians Online Live Help service for this info; and the highly-skilled sex that Inman and Ada finally enjoy (their first time is like high-class porn).

Kidman's reading of the voice-over narration is so high-flown poeticky that it put me in the mood to laugh. With the whole thing motivated by two characters impatient for the Civil War to end so they can fuck, I couldn't help hearing double entendres in Inman's heavily plain self-declaration, "I work wood," and later Ada's diffident-flirtatious, "I have a lot of buttons." But the story is so very drawn-out I couldn't even work up the combative energy derision requires.