Budgeting a studio record $85 million, Miramax has begun hyping Cold Mountain as the “Second Coming” of Gone with the Wind in hopes of repeating history. After all, the Miramax-Minghella love in wartime formula won seven years previously for The English Patient—a shallow 160 minute exercise in tedium. Marketing prospects this time are even more promising, with the box office star power of Nicole Kidman and the always intriguing (for Americans) subject matter of the Civil War. Miramax may successfully promote Cold Mountain well enough that audiences won't realize that they've sat through 155 minutes of banalities, but wary moviegoers should resist the hype. There's really not much of a story going on here.

With a predictable anti-war theme, Cold Mountain essentially boils down to a period piece about survival and idealized love. Like a secular version of Ben Hur without the chariot race, Jude Law's character (named Inman) keeps going via the inspiration of a brief encounter with Ada Monroe (Kidman), who first meets him by offering ice tea. An introspective quiet soul, Inman becomes sickened at the uselessness of war during a Confederate “turkey shoot” but Ada's picture compels him to continue. Numerous times Inman should meet Mr. Death, yet he survives and inches his way back home to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina during the final months of the Civil War.

Adapting Charles Frazier's novel, screenwriter/director Anthony Minghella employs his patented flashbacks for the backstory and dutifully bounces between Inman's survival odyssey and Ada's struggles on the homefront. To provide melodramatic flourishes of evil is a crew of four local Confederates that deem it their duty to uphold the law against deserters, and they'll track them down and execute any able-bodied males from the age of ten on up. For some unexplained reason, these guys are far more obsessed with shooting Confederate deserters than battling the Union army.

Ada has come to Cold Mountain to join her ailing father, Reverend Monroe (Donald Sutherland). Married only 22 months before his wife died, Monroe ensures his daughter that even a brief time with a true love can last a lifetime. Unfortunately, he's only taught his daughter useless things like philosophy, French, and the piano, so she's ill prepared to survive the coming winter when he suddenly expires. Expert at arranging flowers, Ada can't grow anything, nor can she walk past the rooster without getting attacked. An impractical idealist, pining for her lover to return from the War, Ada inexplicably frees the farm's slaves, leaving herself completely at the mercy of kindhearted locals.

Actually, I was in danger of zoning out on Kidman and her pitiful woes until Renée Zellweger came to the rescue with much needed comic relief. Her Ruby Thewes character chops wood, mends fences, kills roosters, clones Granny Clampett's dialect, and prevents audiences from suffering from The English Patient ennui. Hardly subtle or realistic, Zellweger's performance structurally prevents Minghella's story from collapsing. Similarly serving as Jude Law's comic foil, Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays Rev. Veasey wonderfully as a lascivious womanizer far more obsessed with fornicating and moving his constipated bowels than with matters of the spirit. Law doesn't need as much assistance as Kidman, however, since his more active character effectively uses more silent body language to establish nuances.

Minghella's ensemble cast includes numerous great cameos to make the film tolerable. Among them: Veteran actor James Gammon, whose husky voice is even more memorable than his crusty appearance; Natalie Portman as a conflicted grieving widow; and Cillian Murphy (from 28 Days Later . . . ) as a sympathetic Union soldier placed in a difficult situation. Longtime British stage actress Eileen Atkins plays the small, but important role of Maddy, a self sufficient mountain woman sage, who provides religious overtones for Inman's mythological journey. Contrasting with cattle and deer meals that result only in drunken orgies and food poisoning, Maddy's ritualistic goat sacrifice saves Inman's life and soul. She delivers the pedantic dialogue with as much power and force as humanly possible, establishing Maddy among the film's more memorable characters.

Photography fans can find pleasures in Minghella's location shooting. Well known for artfully presenting landscapes, Minghella transforms Transylvania's Carpathian Mountains into a believable North Carolina setting, complete with changing fall leaves and light snowfall. However, without adequate historic content, Cold Mountain can never compete in stature with Gone with the Wind, despite its high production values, beautiful cinematography, and diligent acting performances. Numerous other films have established far more powerful anti-war stances and illustrated how idealized love carries souls far beyond the norm. The major problem lies with the triteness of the script, underscored even more with Minghella's manipulative ending that expects juvenile audiences to collectively sigh. Even Charles Dickens contains more subtlety!

Cold Mountain certainly isn't the weakest film to emerge from 2004, but it's a decided disappointment, given its excessive hype for end of the year awards. If Academy voters are duped into voting this “serious” film as Best Picture, it will then compete with Gladiator as the weakest winner in history. A far more substantial and realistic treatment of love, honor, the effects of war, and personal odyssey is being screened currently in theaters; it's called The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.