THE PERFECT CIVIL WAR MOVIE STILL HASN'T BEEN MADE.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

A FILM DIVIDED against itself, ``Cold Mountain'' wants to simultaneously be a gritty examination of war's devastation and a grand romance, a harrowing study in survival and a cornpone comedy, a distinctive work of art and a conventional commercial/middlebrow award winner.

It could be argued that all this inner conflict is entirely appropriate for a movie that yearns to be one of Hollywood's more serious glosses on the American Civil War. But that would not be an honest argument.

Then again, it's a very tough mission this film mounts and sporadically succeeds at. From ``Birth of a Nation'' through ``Gone With the Wind'' and John Huston's butchered ``Red Badge of Courage'' on to the brain-dead-on-arrival ``Gods and Generals,'' the War Between the States has rarely gotten the thoughtful cinematic treatment it deserves. Outside of ``The General,'' a slapstick comedy, and ``Glory,'' about the only major Hollywood production to grapple with the real crux of the great national tragedy, a Civil War saga that stirs while remaining free of stupidity has proven a stubbornly elusive critter.

By its nature episodic (the film is adapted from Charles Frazier's picaresque, 1997 best seller, which itself was an evident update of ``The Odyssey''), ``Mountain'' director Anthony Minghella's screenplay adaptation rises and falls on the strength of its individual sections and, just as crucially, on the judgment of the actors who populate each.

In the sequences featuring, say, Natalie Portman's lonely, isolated war widow, the cost of the war at home is tallied in vividly heartbreaking human terms. In others, however, the deft touch of Buster Keaton is sorely missing from what, intentionally or not, plays like postbellum burlesque.

Then again, the earthy humor which Minghella and some of the actors bring to ``Cold Mountain'' helps save the project from overweening loftiness - a condition that made Minghella's Oscar winner, the ``sell-out-your-friends-to-the-Nazis-for-love travelogue ``The English Patient,'' even more ridiculous than its morally reprehensible plot. We may snicker at some of the performances, but when something really profound or moving appears on screen, it's been inoculated against pretension.

As for the film's battling main goals, the winner is easy to call. Horrors of conflict beats sweeping movie romance hands down. The date crowd will be disappointed, but I'm not sure that that's such a bad thing.

The tale's 19th-century Ulysses and Penelope are a Blue Ridge boy of few words and one name, Inman (Jude Law), and well-bred Charleston belle Ada Monroe (Nicole Kidman), who moves with her minister father (Donald Sutherland) to the title North Carolina mountain community shortly before the attack on Fort Sumter. She catches Inman's eye, and he catches hers. Being repressed Victorians, they do and don't quite know what to do about this. But just as Inman is about to march off, they exchange a scorcher of a kiss and dour tintypes to remember one another by.

More than three terrible years later, when a wounded Inman decides to desert the doomed Confederate army after the hellacious Battle of the Crater (a scene not in the book, re-created with jarring, filth-encrusted artistry), it is that photograph and memory that drives him across the lawless Virginia piedmont toward home. There, just as devotedly, Ada has been saving herself for Inman by fighting off advances from the awful leader of the Home Guard (Ray Winstone), whose vigilantes will shoot her true love - or anyone they don't like - on sight.

Modern audiences may feel that these crazy kids are basing some pretty important life decisions on incredibly flimsy romantic notions. But considering their desexualized upbringing and the awful suffering they both experience for so long, it's not so implausible that they'd each grasp at a beautiful wisp of memory. In any time and place, certainly, people have sustained wars' duration on far slimmer hopes. Plausibility, though, does not necessarily make for an ageless movie love story.

The years of deprivation are not easy on Ada. Daddy died and, darn it, set the slaves free before he went, rendering his daughter incapable of running the farm (and rendering the movie absurdly - which is a nice way of putting it - devoid of any African-American characters that speak). Near starvation (yet somehow, and again absurdly, always looking as rosily beautiful as Nicole Kidman can look), Ada is only saved by the arrival of a raucous hillbilly who also happens to be a kind of agricultural genius. Renee Zellweger plays this Ruby Thewes quite broadly, yet somehow manages to reclaim her from absurdity. The woman grows emotionally and even calms down a bit. Some will keep laughing anyway.

Whatever goes bad in the relative safety of Cold Mountain is nothing compared to the civilization breakdown Inman encounters on his long walk back. Hunted by both Home Guard and marauding Yankees, Inman grows increasingly haunted as both his life and his faithfulness to Ada are threatened by Furies of lust and destruction, or preserved by witches and his own pragmatic compromises.

Pretty-boy Law convincingly edges his character deeper into moral and physical twilight as the movie ambles along. Character parts are all over the map, from Philip Seymour Hoffman's heartily hypocritical man of cloth and flesh to Brendan Gleeson's stoically regretful, believably scared traveling minstrel. Gleeson's also a pretty good musical entertainer, and the film's least adulterated triumph is its rootsy soundtrack overseen by the invaluable T Bone Burnett.

That last item brings to mind impure thoughts of ``O Brother, Where Art Thou,'' another Southern transposition of ``The Odyssey'' with actors gone wild. We should not, we know, even be comparing such a silly (though, arguably, better) movie to something with the serious intentions of ``Cold Mountain.'' But the fact that we are tells you something.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

COLD MOUNTAIN - Three stars

(R: violence, nudity, sex, language)

Starring: Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Renee Zellweger, Donald Sutherland, Ray Winstone, Brendan Gleeson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Natalie Portman, Kathy Baker, James Gammon, Giovanni Ribisi.

Director: Anthony Minghella.

Running time: 2 hr. 32 min.

Playing: Citywide.

In a nutshell: Civil War ``Odyssey'' update pulls itself in all kinds of different, contradictory directions; some quite impressive, others just puzzling.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) `COLD MOUNTAIN'

(2) Jude Law's Odysseus-like journey in ``Cold Mountain'' includes horrific Civil War battles.