By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * )

A potentially engaging story of a musicologist who sets out to catalogue the hillbilly music of the Appalachian mountains, this film - which featured in last year's midwinter festival - gets rather bogged down in the telling.

Director Greenwald, who also wrote the screenplay, doesn't seem to know what to leave out, so the plot is so inflated with cursorily observed and poorly resolved events that it sometimes seems close to bursting point.

It's set in 1907 as Dr Lily Penleric (McTeer), furious at being passed over for a university promotion because of her gender, leaves to visit her sister Eleanor, who runs a small school in the South Carolina mountains.

Here she discovers a mother lode of musical culture, ancient Scots-Irish ballads handed down through generations and preserved by the seclusion of the people who sing them daily.

In seeking to record the songs - on gramophone and sheet music - she runs head-on into the suspicion of the locals, notably Tom Bledsoe (Quinn), who has been down the mountain (the locals call civilisation the other world) and accuses her of exploitation.

It's an interesting idea, but the ethics of this culture clash are never explored. Instead Greenwald keeps cantering up narrative side roads, cramming in subplots such as a lesbian love affair, a grasping mining company that wants the coal beneath the hillbillies' feet and - most improbably of all - a romantic entanglement between Penleric and Bledsoe.

Penleric, arrogant and condescending at the start, seems ripe for a comeuppance, but McTeer, labouring under the weight of leaden dialogue, never emerges as a rounded character and the story is so cluttered and episodic that nothing ever really gets going.

The music is superb: an orphan girl (Rossum) adopted by Eleanor who is Penleric's primary informant has the voice of an angel, and brief appearances by artists such as Iris Dement and Taj Mahal enliven proceedings.

But continuity blunders - Penleric entering a forest at midnight and emerging into bright sunlight is the worst of many - and design non sequiturs (a cabin with a front as stout as a Ponsonby villa and a back like a tree hut) irritate.

Cast: Janet McTeer, Aidan Quinn, Pat Carroll, Emmy Rossum

Director: Maggie Greenwald

Rating: M

Running time: 113 minutes

Screening: Academy