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Verdict: Just about perfect.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
Cox News Service

Easily the most romantic movie of the year, "Cold Mountain" is also one of the best. Writer-director Anthony Minghella ("The English Patient") has captured the mix of faith and fear that permeates Charles Frazier's prize-winning novel. He understands the book's fear of loss and faith that loss can be mutable - that loss is both an end and a beginning.

A Civil War odyssey, "Cold Mountain" follows a soldier headed home from war to the woman who has waited for him for years. Just like Homer's Odysseus and Penelope, Inman (Jude Law) and Ada (Nicole Kidman) face seemingly insurmountable obstacles, perils and temptations.

Opening with the battle of Petersburg in Virginia, the picture plunges us into a chaotic hell of blood, mud and death. Badly wounded, Inman is sent to an army hospital. There, a letter from Ada pleads for his return: "If you are fighting, stop fighting. If you are marching, stop marching. Come back to me." He walks out of the hospital and keeps walking - hundreds of miles - to the tiny town of Cold Mountain in North Carolina. If he is caught by the Home Guard - brutal self-appointed vigilantes who hunt down deserters for the bounty reward - he will be shot.

Things aren't going very smoothly on the homefront, either. The daughter of a widower minister (Donald Sutherland), Ada has been brought up as her father's companion, not as a 19th-century woman. She can read French and play the piano, but she can't even cook an egg and is at the mercy of a bullying rooster.

Enter Ruby (ReneŽ Zellweger, all but carrying a best supporting Oscar under her arm). A rough-hewn mountain woman, Ruby deals with the rooster with a twist of its neck and sets about teaching Ada how to live in the real world. In return, Ada teaches Ruby about literature and poetry.

Meanwhile, Inman continues his long walk home. On the way, he meets a charmingly blasphemous preacher (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a duplicitous backwoods boy (Giovanni Ribisi) and a trio of unlikely sirens. Most heartbreakingly memorable is his encounter with a young widow (Natalie Portman) who knows she and her toddler are unlikely to see the end of the war - or even the next spring.

This is not David O. Selznick's Civil War. Tara and Twelve Oaks have nothing to do with the hardscrabble world of the Blue Ridge mountains. Yet, when word arrives the war is on, these dirt-poor mountain boys whoop it up just like "Gone With the Wind's" bullheaded, racist aristocrats. The men of Cold Mountain have more in common with Ratso Rizzo than Ashley Wilkes. Most of them have probably never met a slave. But for them, the war is a matter of pride, a way of telling the Yankees they can't tell Southerners what to do. Their macho idiocy is soon apparent; as one character says, they were sent to war with "a flag and a lie."

Minghella, who also wrote the screenplay, is remarkably faithful to the book - not just its incidents, but its tone, which is part love story, part picaresque odyssey, part meditation on the horrors of war. The one thing he somewhat misses is Frazier's reverence for the land, for the rapture of rocks and streams and mountains. The beauty is there in John Seale's splendid cinematography, but it's more seen than felt from within.

Still, that's a quibble about an otherwise breathtaking film. Portman and Eileen Atkins, as a good-witch healer, only have a few minutes on-screen, but they add poignant grace notes. Hoffman's Foghorn Leghorn man of God and Zellweger's Southern-fried Annie Oakley exude a comic bluster that's the perfect counterpoint to Law and Kidman's tender, pungent love story. Golden Globe nominations have already been handed to Law, Kidman and Zellweger, and Oscar can't be far behind. Like Peter Jackson's epic "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, "Cold Mountain" is one of the most intelligent and caring book-to-screen transitions ever made. And like its hero, this movie's course is true.