The hardships and heartache of the American Civil War, cushioned in the plushness of the production: the crane-happy camera, the spendthrift special effects, the "painterly" washes of color and "dynamic" compositions, the visual poetry and bombast, the chiselled and sanded faces of the A-list romantic leads, Nicole Kidman (with her Orientalized eyes) and Jude Law (blue lagoons). Paying customers will likely feel they are getting a lot for their money, and no doubt they are getting a lot of money for their money. They will also be getting, by way of the prize-winning novel by Charles Frazier, spools and spools of storyline, strung out to a slight sag: back and forth in time, from the Siege of Petersburg in 1864 and its immediate aftermath, to the antebellum quietude of the North Carolina hills; and then, after the convergence of the two time lines, back and forth in space only, from the eventful homeward trek of a wounded Confederate deserter, to the struggle of the womenfolk to keep the home fires burning. On both fronts, it's the gentle sex who bear the heaviest burdens, particularly moral and philosophical ones: "[If] I had my way, they'd take metal altogether out of this world, every gun, every blade." No doubt, too, the film gains interest as a companion piece to director Anthony Minghella's earlier English Patient, in once again promoting personal priority over general cause, and the lover over the fighter. The large cast has plenty of interest of its own. Renée Zellweger, as an Erskine Caldwell -- or even Al Capp -- poor white trashy Southerner (strike up the fiddle and banjo), runs rings around Kidman's well-bred belle once she is let loose almost an hour into the film; and there are strong contributions from Eileen Atkins (a backwoods goatherd meticulously realized down to the dirt beneath her fingernails), Kathy Baker, James Gammon, Ray Winstone, Brendan Gleeson, Donald Sutherland, and Natalie Portman. But then again, the cast also has Philip Seymour Hoffman and Giovanni Ribisi in it. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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