Cold Mountain

By EWAN McDONALD

If there is one time when a movie that runs over two and a half hours seems really enthralling, it's when you're flying over the vast plains of Russia (or whatever it's called these days) around 2am and you can't sleep and the dinky little screen thingie on the seat-back in front of you says that Cold Mountain is about to start running.

Anthony Minghella (The Talented Mr Ripley, The English Patient, Truly Madly Deeply) recruited an army of stars for his Civil War epic based on Charles Frazier's bestseller. He also signed up Romania to play the part of the rebel states.

The movie opens in 1864, around the time they drove old Dixie down, as the South is losing the Civil War. After a devastating injury, WP Inman (Jude Law) deserts his comrades to find his way back home to Cold Mountain, North Carolina, and Ada (Nicole Kidman), daughter of a preacher man (Donald Sutherland). Inman last saw Ada three years earlier and he doesn't know whether she is waiting for him. After all, they met only briefly although it was clear that this was A Significant Event.

The news for our good ol' boy is that Ada is still waiting, looking, as the Guardian critic wrote, "like an eight-foot blonde refugee from Planet Fashion. She winds up wearing a gorgeous black coat and homburg-style hat combo which shows that whatever privations war might have brought to the Old South, there's still a branch of DKNY open nearby."

On the farm, the parson has died and the smallholding left to go all to pieces until a kindly neighbour woman sends Ruby Thewes (Renee Zellweger) to help Ada at a-splitting rails, a-milking cows, a-wringing turkey necks and the like. But trouble lurks in the troubling form of Teague (Ray Winstone), head of the local deserter-hunting vigilantes, who wants to get his paws on Ada and her land.

Meanwhile our brave soldier is still marching home, not put off his stride by encounters with a philandering minister (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a young mother victimised by Northern soldiers (Natalie Portman), and a strange loner in the woods, in episodes that may recall Homer's Odyssey, O Brother! Where Art Thou? or The English Patient (oh, sorry, that was a totally different movie adapted from a best-selling novel and directed by Anthony Minghella starring the elegant Kirstin Scott Thomas as a solitary woman who encounters a traumatised soldier in wartime).

Will our heroes ever get back together? Who will save the day (and anyone who completes that sentence with "Renee Zellweger" is just a mean ol' spoilsport)? And sizzling sassafras, whatever happened to dem ol' black folks that this war was supposed to be'bout, boy, coz there ain't none o' dem about these parts, no sir.

There is much to enjoy about Cold Mountain, although Kidman and Law have not a proton or neutron of chemistry between them, and that "much" is the energy and relish that Zellweger brings to the movie when she shows up, about an hour into the (yawn, pardon), action, some of those cameos, and the remarkable scale of this epic and its cinematography.

On the DVD Cold Mountain looks and sounds wonderful. Extras include a commentary track by Minghella and editor Walter Murch, though the detail will be too much for anyone who's not a moviemaking junkie. Climbing Cold Mountain documents the film from designs and models to its final touches. There's a more hyped, less detailed version in the making-of feature, A Journey to Cold Mountain. Words and Music of Cold Mountain dissects the films soundtrack with discussion from Minghella and Sidney Pollack.

There are deleted scenes, storyboard comparisons and trailers for merchandise including The English Patient Collectors' Edition DVD.

Herald rating * * *

DVD, video rental July 7