It certainly has enough antiquated romance elements for a parody of a Walter Scott novel. These include a well in which you can glimpse the future by gazing at the water in a mirror; Ruby, a rough-hewn mountain girl who repeatedly strikes poses with her hands on her hips as if she were about to sing "You Can't Get a Man With a Gun"; a gypsy goat lady with wispy facial hair; a blind peanut-selling seer; a rapscallion of a preacher; two healing women; three strolling minstrels; a houseful of lustful witches headed up by a pasty-faced Judas; and at least half a dozen paramilitary demons, one an albino with violet eyes, who torture women and a swaddled infant. Oh boy. Minghella has the inventory but lacks Scott's skill at combining realism and romance and historicism in one surging narrative, as well as his progressive intelligence (so astute as to what is gained and lost in historical change, an awareness that justifies his use of backward-looking romance).

If the movie went by faster and weren't so flossily soulful, it might work as overripe historical camp, like Verdi's Il Trovatore, full of stolen pleasures amid torrid agony and armed conflict. As is, the movie is like Trovatore without the music and with about half the theatrical zest. The only time the audience roused was when Renee Zellweger came on as that mountain girl Ruby who teaches Ada how to take care of herself without men and servants. It's a robust comedy turn, given "depth" by dragging in her hard-drinkin' daddy with whom she's reconciled when they're both attacked by a self-elected Confederate Home Guard that hunts down and dispatches deserters. Zellweger uses eccentric vocal tricks in breathless readings that whip you right past the pathos; unlike Law she does seem like a magician, though what she accomplishes doesn't push the movie into a higher realm but merely enlivens it with intentional camp. It's a coarser bit of work than she normally does, but that suits the character and is almost necessary to dispel the movie's soporific erotic fog.

The pairing of Ruby and Ada in the long central section is like the pairing of resourceful, defiant Scarlett and sweet, passive Melanie in Gone With the Wind (1939)--a movie the scope of which makes Cold Mountain seem like a postage stamp expanded to the size of a billboard. But Cold Mountain also makes a very old-Hollywood choice in focusing on wan, refined Ada instead of fearless, spunky Ruby. It's too long a movie to ask us to identify with the girl who shrieks at the approach of a symbolically aggressive rooster rather than with the gal who knows a meal when she sees one and promptly rips the cock's head off. I also wonder if Minghella is aware of the black-widow shadow the tragic outcome casts over the supposedly idyllic ending. Ada enjoys Inman once before his death, and for all we see once is enough, to last a lifetime, now that she has a (female) child and knows how to skin a lamb.