A number of fine performances, led by the scene-stealing Renee Zellweger and Chaucerian hypocrite Philip Seymour Hoffman, salvage some interesting moments in this drippy C-grade Harlequin novel. Director Anthony Minghella unsuccessfully marries the soulful ruminations of “The English Patient” to an exceedingly hackneyed picaresque that recalls the wackier moments of the Coen Brothers’ “O Brother Where Art Thou” rather than the high romance of “Gone With The Wind”.

Although the anti-war message is welcome, the attempt at a stately historical tale is mussed up by the spirited, almost improvisational quality of the character actors whom Inman (Inman!) meets on his travels. Despite Minghella’s efforts to spin out a gossamer love story, the smaller tableaux yield a hardier thread. Beneath the pomp is a comic reminder about our true motivations. Much as we would like to believe that enchanting narcotics like love plot our course, it is life’s urgent and often colorful necessities that lead us along by the nose. The act of sawing a cow in quarters to get it home, for instance, has infinitely more truth in it than two hours of Ada’s quasi-poetic love letters. Zellweger’s Ruby Thews brings so much raw vigor to the movie, so much uncouth vitality, that the tone is disrupted every time she’s onscreen, and for the better.

Zellweger seems to be acting at a much faster speed than Nicole Kidman, who doesn’t have much to do aside from tosssing out wistful looks from the sidelines. Ada seems to have more of a schoolgirl’s infatuation with an ideal beau rather than the burning passion required of the epic-minded story. When she lingers over one of Cathy’s flights of passion in “Wuthering Heights”, it was a chance for Minghella to give his overwrought screenplay a self-deprecating nudge. Instead the scene is played straight, becoming one of the most groaningly unironic scenes in recent movie history.

Law, smoldering with quasi-Lawrentian yearning, keeps things moving along in every scene—other than those with Kidman, with whom he has little chemistry—thanks to an underwritten backstory in which an entire romance blooms over a glass of lemonade. All of this is wrapped up neatly in a “tragic” ending that reeks of false grandeur and crass Hollywood posturing. “Cold Mountain” is a perfect case study in the chilling effect of the Prestige Picture.