There will be spoilers here, in all likelihood, so you are warned. There is also a bit of ranty snarkiness, too.
I'm just not quite sure what all the fuss is about, and maybe that's just me, (well, apparently that's just me since this one was nominated for various Golden Globes and I think a couple of Oscars), but this might as well have been the Southern Patient, what with all the unrequited love, angst, war, and tragic endings -- and the same Director as The English Patient, who apparently favors the hammer-it-on-the-head emoting method of story-telling. Anthony Minghella directs this from what is supposed to be a terrific book, which I couldn't tell you about since it bored me to tears right off the bat and I couldn't keep reading. And maybe it's just me, but a movie which has to have tons and tons of voice-over to convey the emotional moments and give the context has forgotten it's a movie (and no, I don't care that it was an adaptation).
Ultimately, I didn't care about the southern-crossed lovers who are broken up when the civil war starts, and I don't know the people mutilated in all the battle scenes, so it's just another director's take on the brutality of war, like we haven't guessed that war is pretty awful. I don't care that Jude Law (who is gorgeous even if he looks like he hasn't bathed in a decade) loves Nicole Kidman (I have thankfully forgotten their character's names), and he has done so with such longing looks and no touching and geez, enough with the chaste already, do something. But they can't, there is a war, and he gives her a kiss and runs off.
And they write letters. One would assume they had actually received each others' letters for all the angst and longing and heart-breaking going on, but it turns out in the end that he had only gotten three (though she probably wrote "a hundred and three") and I'm not sure if she even got one from him back, and who knows how on earth she knew what he felt for her, besides the one hot kiss. (Of course, in the book, there were probably whole chapters devoted to this.)
So the movie is one, very long trudge of hottie Jude Law going home to be with poor helpless Nicole Kidman, who now has Ruby, but of course, he has obstacle after obstacle after obstacle to overcome to get home, and the women have lots of hardships, and finally, finally, on a very cold mountain, in the frozen snow-covered cabin, the couple meets up again, barely talks to each other at first, then talks a couple of minutes, then marries each other and has hot sex. Finally. So of course, he has to die the next day, because God forbid there should actually be any happiness for either of them with all the hardships, and when he really did die (who did not see that coming a mile away?), I sat there and thought, "this sucks." I wanted my two hours back. There was no real journey here, no real learning curve, except to survive and take care of yourself, and barely a journey at that, and for the life of me, I can't discern a real story here except that life sucks, you may fall in love, but then you die.
I just do not know what the fuss was all about.