Based on the novel by Charles Frazier, Anthony Minghella’s new film is a love story played out against the backdrop of the American civil war. In the small town of Cold Mountain, North Carolina, a handsome farm worker called Inman (Jude Law) falls in love with Ada Monroe (Nicole Kidman), a newly arrived Southern belle who is the daughter of the local preacher. She falls for him. They steal glances at each other from across the great social divide … then they steal a kiss. But before their love can blossom, war breaks out. Inman goes off to fight for the South; he becomes wounded, disillusioned and a deserter. So begins his great trek back across war-torn America to find his true love.

Although the film opens with a bloody smattering of men at war — the infamously grisly Battle of the Crater (1864) — it’s actually more interested in the damage and destruction done to families and communities away from the battlefield. But, like all war films, it shows us the futility of war, and we are meant to shake our heads and think, in the words of Edwin Starr, that great American pacifist — “War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing”.

Actually, the American civil war led to the abolition of slavery and the preservation of the Union.

But let’s leave that little point aside. I don’t know about you, but when a civil-war film features a character like Inman (see Ang Lee’s Ride with the Devil), one who eagerly goes off to fight for the South, my sympathy for him is limited. We’re meant to care about a character who fights for the right to maintain the institution of slavery? Indeed, the whole slavery issue is pretty much avoided in Minghella’s screenplay. Inman’s position is never made clear and neither is Monroe’s. She’s an educated and bookish woman, but never discusses the great burning issue of the day. Cold Mountain’s silence about slavery is like watching an adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary that doesn’t mention the Nazis.

Okay, so what we have is a love story that’s mostly told in Monroe’s voiced-over love letters and Inman’s flashback memories. Both lovers are on a great journey of survival. Inman is the Homeric hero, trying to return to his beloved and facing obstacles and temptations that he deals with in a singularly triumphant way. He saves a black woman from being drowned by a licentious priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman), helps a hillbilly (Giovanni Ribisi) with his sick cow, turns down sexual offers from numerous women and saves a single mum (Natalie Portman) from rape at the hands of them damn Yankees.

You might think: wow, what a guy! Amid the brutality of war, he has kept his humanity. Yet the script has him declare, after his return to Cold Mountain, that he has lost whatever goodness and tenderness he once possessed. It’s an unconvincing moment that contradicts everything we’ve just seen about him.

Alongside Inman’s journey is Monroe’s. With the death of her daddy, she’s unable to survive the demands of farming. Rescue comes in the form of Ruby (Renée Zellweger), a spunky Calamity Jane type who can pull on a cow’s teat, wring a chicken’s neck, fire a shotgun, brand a herd and mend a fence — all at the same time. Ruby rescues not only Monroe, but the film, too.

Suddenly, there’s a character with some life to her.

In the figures of Inman and Ruby, Cold Mountain is showing us an alternative myth to that of the solitary individual hero who survives by his/her own will. Neither Inman nor Ruby, nor anybody else in the film, can survive without the help of others. The central message is a plea for friendship and community. It’s saying: we need each other to survive.

Very worthy, that, but Cold Mountain’s fine sentiments cannot save it from being second-rate. One key problem is Jude Law: he is a good character actor with a great face, but he doesn’t have the tough physicality to be con-vincing as a survivor. I didn’t believe he could last five minutes on a battlefield. As a tragic love story, too, the film is an utter failure. There is a big emotional hole right at the centre. Inman and Monroe’s desperate, aching hunger for each other never leaps off the screen and into your lap. You are left feeling nothing. Unlike Scarlett and Rhett, or Cathy and Heathcliff (Monroe reads Wuthering Heights to Ruby), Inman and Monroe aren’t engaging characters in their own right. They command attention because it’s Law and Kidman up there. And whatever was or wasn’t going on off screen between these two, there’s certainly nothing going on on screen. (All you Law-lovers, check out the way he smothers those matchstick lips of Kidman’s with a big, face-sucking smacker that practically vacuums her nose up.) Amazingly, Cold Mountain has received eight Golden Globe nominations. That sounds pretty impressive, until you realise that these awards are given by a bunch of notoriously sycophantic Hollywood- based hacks. Please don’t be fooled by impressive-looking, gushing trailers: Cold Mountain is a frigid film with the dull earnestness that many mistake for quality drama.

Cold Mountain
15, 152 mins, One star

See the trailer for Cold Mountain on December’s The Month CD-Rom