If, as many pundits have prophesied, the director M. Night Shyamalan (Signs, The Sixth Sense) is the new generation's Hitchcock, I think it only fair to look for other candidates, other heirs, to the legacies of our greatest cinematic visionaries. Start with Cukor...maybe the Farrelly Brothers share his sense for comic timing?  For DeMille's luxuriousness, possibly Stephen Daldry? Isn't Quentin Tarantino really the celluloid love child of Bob Fosse and Tsui Hark?

All of these are uncertain nominations on my part, but on one legacy, I am absolutely sure. Anthony Minghella, with his latest epic drama COLD MOUNTAIN, has become this generation's David Lean. Already an Academy Award winner with two major successes (The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley) and one well-regarded art film (Truly Madly Deeply) under his belt, Minghella has always shown an unparalleled ability for grandeur, scope, and gravitas. The story of any film he touches becomes deeper through his eyes; he instinctively grasps the larger, human forces at work in any situation, and reaps the dramatic rewards. He is a master filmmaker, and deserves a place on any serious filmgoer's must-see list.

Such talent is even more welcome when dealing with uneven material, and in adapting Charles Frazier's award-winning book, Minghella -- a renowned playwright as well as director and screenwriter -- faced an uphill challenge. There are macrocosmic and microcosmic forces at work in COLD MOUNTAIN that share a precarious balance; personal relationships collide into the massive social upheaval caused by the Civil War. Bouncing from the small story of a burgeoning romance to the larger tale of American schism and back again is difficult to say the least...and to make the two narrative threads resonate with one another is harder still. It is a challenge that, thankfully, Minghella is up to.

Anyone who finds themselves conflicted about current world events and the violence it has spawned will find much food for thought in COLD MOUNTAIN. Minghella's film is, first and foremost, about the ravages of wartime...but framed to an intimate scale, tracing the devastating consequences such violence takes upon individuals. Yes, its story does concern a young couple, but the real subject is the scarred and blood-soaked South, a beautiful and proud land that is showing the visible (and invisible) bruises and batterings this uncivil war has brought upon it. Pristine landscapes rest alongside muddy, charred battlefields. The savage poetry of this dichotomy is not lost upon Minghella, who mines its metaphorical value, or upon his longtime cinematographer John Seale (The Perfect Storm), who captures the stark beauty without sacrificing its honesty. This is a film about Mountains, as its title implies, but the coldness is a relatively new addition...it lies in the icy, soulless destruction men are wreaking upon these mountainous fields.

Inman (Jude Law) is a shy, charming farmer who has caught the attentions of the preacher's daughter, Ada Monroe (Nicole Kidman), right before the outbreak of the Civil War. Before romance can truly blossom, Inman has to rush off to fulfill his duty to the Confederacy. Idealism comes crashing down around the couple's heads -- Inman faces unspeakable horrors in battle, and Ada faces both the death of her father and the crippling fear that Inman may have perished. As the two confront harsh realities, a tearstained letter from Ada becomes the lightning rod for their futures. "Stop fighting," she pleads in it, "and come back to me."

Like the photographic tintypes Ada and Inman clutch of each other through their long separation, the idea of a future reunion becomes talismanic -- an idea that wards off despair and provides hope, energy, and the promise of a better future. Are they in love?  Who knows...ultimately, it isn't even important. What is important is that, with everything they've ever known vanishing before their eyes -- their homes, their fathers, their ethics, and as Inman says, their 'goodness' -- these two souls suddenly have something to live for, an idea, a purpose, a vision of home and what it stands for. During wartime, as any survivor will tell you, the dream of home often becomes the only reason one continues fighting.

As Inman goes AWOL and is pursued by Conferdate bounty hunters, his odyssey back to Cold Mountain brings him into contact with a broad swath of Southern life: a sex-hungry minister (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a hermetic medicine woman (Eileen Atkins), and a lonely war widow (Natalie Portman). Ada, for her part, has a journey of her own; unable to survive alone or tend her farm, she takes on a rip-snorting boarder, Ruby (Renee Zellwegger), and the two women end up caring for war deserters and refugees, one of whom turns out to be Ruby's estranged father (Brendan Gleeson).

The characters' survival of brutality echoes the larger themes of social evisceration; there are times, looking at COLD MOUNTAIN, where one can imagine the earth itself groaning under its own emotional burden. There's a plaintive beauty in this interplay, a magisterial shape to the screenplay -- perhaps too polished for some jaded moviegoers, but not for lovers of epic style.

As Inman, Jude Law capably handles leading-man duties by never giving in to the character's heroic tendencies. As played by Law, Inman is simply a man -- a decent one, undone by his experiences, only tenuously retaining the fragments of his humanity. Kidman has less to play with as the aristocratic Ada, and seems hamstrung in some scenes. Luckily, Zellwegger, Hoffman, and Gleeson fill out their scenes extremely well, with performances that are tragicomic without overstepping the film's boundaries. It is possible, COLD MOUNTAIN seems to say, to still have a spirit in the face of unrelenting malevolence...something I'll remember when I attempt to watch CNN's latest reports.

Minghella shares one other distinct trait with Lean, one evident in both The English Patient and Lawrence of Arabia -- a distinct understanding of cinematic showbizzery. COLD MOUNTAIN is sad and beautiful, but it is also luxurious, even glamorous at times. While some will undoubtedly find this off-putting, it nevertheless recollects old-school epic grandeur. There is, after all, a tragic majesty in war, of bombs bursting in air and the rockets' red glare. Minghella is too excellent a craftsman to simply tromp around the in literal and metaphorical mud -- he wants us to feel the melodrama and the drama, the sweep and the rage, the eloquence and the ugliness. It is, in some respects, a harsher version of Gone With The Wind...and that, my friends, is not bad company. There's treasures to be found underneath COLD MOUNTAIN, and Minghella, like Lean, wants you to enjoy every second.

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