War gets in the way of love

Were it not for a gruesomely violent battle sequence at the beginning, a smattering of profanity and an occasional glimpse of unclothed flesh, Cold Mountain might easily be mistaken for the product of an earlier era of movie-making. The film, freely adapted by Anthony Minghella from Charles Frazier's best-selling novel, is an episodic romance that begins like a war movie and ends like a western, and it requires an old-fashioned critical idiom to do it justice. It is, as my predecessor Bosley Crowther might have said, one heck of a classy picture.

I mean this both as sincere praise and as a qualification of that praise. Cold Mountain, at once generous and self-congratulatory, full of lush scenery and large emotions, clearly longs for a home on the video store's classics shelf. To speed its passage, it arrives laden with the trappings of prefabricated cultural prestige, including a high-toned literary pedigree and a lustrous cast of past and future Oscar winners and nominees. The film, opening nationwide today, thus follows in what has become a Miramax tradition of highly polished, and often lifeless, literary adaptations, including The English Patient (also directed by Minghella), The Cider House Rules and Chocolat.

Fortunately, Cold Mountain, which stars Jude Law and Nicole Kidman as would-be lovers separated by the cruelty and privation of the American Civil War, distinguishes itself from such middlebrow conversation-stoppers. Its sober good taste is enlivened by large doses of intelligence and humor, and even a touch of authentic cinematic grandeur.

By authentic I mean utterly artificial. Minghella, who can be overly solemn in pursuit of realism, is, thank goodness, also entranced by the beauty of exotic landscapes and the charisma of movie stars. Kidman, playing Ada Monroe, a citified preacher's daughter stranded in the remote hamlet of Cold Mountain, North Carolina, has never been lovelier, and her radiance at once challenges your disbelief and compels you to suspend it. Even dressed in cast-off men's clothes and struggling against the rigors of 19th-century rural life, she looks as if she had stepped from the pages of a glossy magazine, her eyebrows and cuticles painstakingly attended to. This incongruity adds to the movie's charm rather than dispelling it.

And in nearly every particular -- including the soundtrack, which blends Gabriel Yared's lavish symphonic orchestration with Appalachian fiddle breakdowns and Deep-South Sacred Harp vocal harmonies -- the movie's elegant fakery improves on the book's stiff pretentiousness. The gothic landscape of Romania (beautifully photographed by John Seale) stands in for the hills and hollows of western North Carolina, and the plain country people who inhabit the novel's mock-folksy episodes are impersonated onscreen by a platoon of well-respected actors, many of them British, who drawl their vowels and clip their consonants into approximations of Southern American dialect.

Law's accent is probably the most convincing, and his matinee-idol features are, for much of the movie, camouflaged by grime, fatigue and an unkempt beard. One peculiarity of Cold Mountain is that it is a love story in which the two romantic leads share little screen time and often seem to inhabit separate movies. In early flashbacks, Ada and Inman, Law's wry, taciturn character, trade flirtatious glances and share a rushed farewell kiss, but mostly they are apart, clinging to the dim prospect of reunion as a survival strategy.