Jude and Nicole chill out

An irony lurks behind this fable of romantic strife that is probably lost on its creators. Shot mostly on location in Romania, the filming of Anthony Minghella's adaptation of Charles Frazier's American Civil War novel, Cold Mountain, reproduced some of the cruel past it seeks to depict.

Minghella may have been thinking, location, location, location; but someone on the production was calculating budget, budget, budget. Transylvania c. 2002 doesn't only look like North Carolina in the mid-19th century, but the wages payable to Romanian extras and crew are comparably low. The country also has excellent production facilities, since it was the Soviet-era centre for filmmaking throughout the Eastern bloc. To the cinematic victor the spoils.

A big element of Cold Mountain - as with so many Southern epics, from The Birth of a Nation through Gone with the Wind and on - is revisionism. Don't locate all right on the Union side, these filmmakers say, and all wrong on the Confederacy.

Apart from the slavery issue, south of the Mason-Dixon line were toiling farmers who felt themselves to be fiendishly exploited by the industrialists of the North. I daresay the Romanians on $100 a month - while the Hollywood elite were raking in their usual Midas touch - would also have something to say about exploitation.

As to slavery, in Minghella's film - which is faithful to the novel - it is put firmly to one side. The only black faces we encounter are fleeing through a cornfield as Jude Law's Inman comes by on his way back from the war. "I have no quarrel with you," he tells them. Indeed, Jude prevents the libertine Reverend Veasey (brilliantly played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) from murdering a slave girl he has impregnated.

Meanwhile, back at Cold Mountain, his love object, Ada Monroe (Nicole Kidman), has released her slaves without us ever seeing them. True, there are glimpses of black faces among the Union troops at the frighteningly realised battle of Petersburg, but they are counterbalanced by the Native American who fights alongside the good ol' boys from Cold Mountain.

Still, Minghella didn't set out to make a political film, except insofar as Cold Mountain is an anti-war film. And when Ruby Thewes, the feisty farming girl played by Renée Zellweger, utters perhaps the most poignant lines in the film: "War is a cloud over the land ... but the men made the weather, and then they stand out there getting wet and say, 'Look Ma, it's raining,'" it could be any war that she's condemning, not just this singularly vicious internecine conflict. No, Minghella has made a romance and, as with any other love story, this one stands or falls on the heat generated between the protagonists. Trouble is, if there was any on-set chemistry between Kidman and Law it was an experiment that spluttered out rather than caught fire.

For most of the film, Minghella doesn't have to put these compounds in the same Petri dish. Stolid, silent Inman loves ethereal Ada, but he is away at the war for four years (two hours), so we don't have to withstand the imposture of their affection - any more than we have to put up with two botched Southern accents in the same scene.

There's no doubting that Kidman and Law turn in good enough performances, but why, oh why, couldn't they spend longer with their voice coaches? In the past it may not have mattered if actors didn't achieve high levels of verisimilitude, but with contemporary productions that can recreate the past quite as convincingly as this, the sound of consonants from the wrong continents is as loud as the gunfire.

Still, Jude doesn't have much to say, having received a bullet in the vocal chords at the aforementioned siege. Perhaps because of this, his portion of the film is by far the most satisfying.