The common tragedies of war and romance are all-too often the
subject of literature and cinema. It’s just plain easy to
produce a tear-jerking plotline that mixes the brutality of battle
with the heart-breaking distance of destined lovers. “The
Odyssey” (the Homer poem, not the Armand Assante TV movie) is
mostly to blame for this classic storytelling device, yet“The
Odyssey” also lends its structure to the epic Civil War love
story of Anthony Minghella’s “Cold Mountain.” And
that’s a good thing on this occasion.

Like his Oscar-winning “The English Patient,”
Minghella finds his material in a best-selling novel of tragic
proportions (this time in the work of Charles Frazier) and then
assumes the perfect perspective that makes for classic Hollywood
romance. Partially drawing from his “Patient” follow-up
— the underrated style of the disturbing “The Talented
Mr. Ripley” — for the casting couch,
“Mountain” one-ups “Patient” in its
ensemble. In fact, the talent assembled here rivals that of any
motion picture of the past five years (key word being talent, and
not just star status).

Inman (“Ripley” co-star Jude Law) calls Cold
Mountain in North Carolina his home and a brief, repressed
courtship with the preacher’s daughter Ada Monroe (Nicole
Kidman) preludes his call to the North-South battlefields. Through
wartime letters, the two share more words on paper than they ever
exchanged face to face. Law and Kidman more than fit their
People’s “50 Most Beautiful People” roles with
each displaying a solid foreground of gorgeousness and shy
sexuality that Minghella surrounds with fly-by cameos.

The cameos make the movie. While the Inman-Ada romantic angle
remains vital enough to never fall below the audience’s
threshold of caring, it also goes entirely by the book, never
achieving that quality of a once-in-a-lifetime love that dominated
the superior romantics of “The English Patient.” With
Inman deserting a Confederate hospital for the long road back to
Cold Mountain, a flurry of characters (and character actors) greet
him on his journey. In isolated sequences, Philip Seymour
Hoffman’s lascivious reverend, Veasey, and Natalie
Portman’s forlorn widow, Sara, provide Inman’s odyssey
with saw-stealing laughs and Union-pillaging sadness, each actor
creating depths to their characters with the blink of an eye.

Ada’s home stand finds her fighting the clichéd
woman-wanting, money-grubbing baddies of Teague (Ray Winstone,
“Sexy Beast”) and Bosie (Charlie Hunnam, TV’s
“Undeclared”). Winstone and Hunnam somehow overcome
silly dialogue and overdone theatrics, but the true saving grace,
both literally and figuratively, is Renee Zellweger’s
talkative tomboy Ruby Thewes.

Zellweger’s ball of energy injects the film with an
unexpected jolt. With the death of her father, Ada could not
survive without Ruby’s knowledge of the rugged, and
“Cold Mountain” would not survive a viewer’s
patience without the scene-stealing Zellweger. There is more joy in
watching Ruby’s buried tenderness unearthed than the remote
lovers reunited. This observation reveals the film’s failure
and also its greatest asset.

Rating: 4 stars.