By Rex Reed

December 10, 2000 | 7:00 p.m

The Christmas countdown begins. With approximately 30 more

movies to open before the annual Dec. 31 deadline for Oscar consideration-at least a dozen of which are scheduled to simultaneously start rolling on projectors Dec. 22-holiday traffic at the movies is rapidly approaching gridlock. I'm spreading the news the only way possible-as fast as I can see them, I'll pass the word on to you. The final vote is yours, so conserve your energy, consider the candidates on your holiday menu carefully and watch those hanging chads. High on the recommended list there is the enchanting Chocolat , an unusual and magical film by the distinguished director Lasse Hallström-his first since last year's The Cider House Rules , and a real charmer that turns out to be as delectable as its title. Chocolat is a modern-day fable (read: fairy tale) about the restorative power of food that raises the photogenic splendors of hot fudge to a level of art worthy of an exhibition at the Guggenheim. The setting is a picturesque but stodgy and old-fashioned village in a remote region of France: resistant to change, suspicious of outsiders and firmly ensconced in the centuries-old didactic religious and social traditions that have kept its citizens moribund. On a blustery winter day while everyone is at Mass, a cold wind strong enough to blow out the altar candles sweeps into town a drifter named Vianne (Juliette Binoche), a cheerful but scandalously unmarried single mother, and her beautiful young daughter Anouk (Victoire Thivisol), both dressed like Little Red Riding Hood. Vianne moves into an empty apartment above a shuttered store front and has the audacity to open a chocolate shop in the middle of Lent! While the dour, sullen mayor (Alfred Molina, as the most frustrated villain in years) does everything he can to poison the minds of the villagers against Vianne and drive her out of business, he is powerless against the mouthwatering aromas and welcoming confections that pour out of Vianne's kitchen, lure curious customers into her shop and transform the dreary atmosphere of the grim town. One bite of her sumptuously sinful chocolate seashells and the town's unsmiling and long-suffering widow (Leslie Caron) sheds the black mourning shrouds she's been wearing since World War I and finds romance. Vianne's crabby old landlady (Judi Dench) takes one sip of her hot cocoa with ground chili peppers and turns positively jolly and ribald. The rose creams with Cointreau empower an abused housewife (Lena Olin) with a new personality and the self-confidence to leave her violent, brutish husband. Estranged families reunite, loveless marriages rekindle and children discover the joys of repressed adolescence as Vianne's secret ingredients unlock hidden longings and unleash unfulfilled destinies. Even Vianne herself finds love and a sense of belonging with an unwelcome riverboat vagabond (Johnny Depp). But as her exotic truffles awaken a newly discovered taste for pleasure and freedom, the self-righteous mayor denounces the profound effect on his villagers as an erosion of morality. Something must be done to stop the fun, so the old goat declares war on chocolate and a near tragedy ensues. But this is an uplifting feel-good film, and even a rigid, bigoted, pious control freak like the mayor meets his Waterloo when it comes to desserts. The film is gorgeously photographed, with all the splendid postcard views you might find in an illustrated edition of Maeterlinck's The Bluebird , and the tongue-in-cheek performers are exhilaratingly secure in their grasp of the whimsical material. Ms. Binoche has never been less prosaic (read: vacuous) or more beautiful, but even she is sometimes upstaged by the chocolate. There is one delightful sequence in which she and her newly liberated friends prepare a lavish dinner for her landlord's 70th birthday that is the most sensual exploration of food on film since Babette's Feast . Mr. Hallström temporarily abandons his fine cast to lovingly zoom in on the whisks and spoons and ladles that whip vats of addictive chocolate into decadent macaroons, mocha kisses, marble cakes, mousses, tortes, Florentines and russes of indescribably rich rapture. My own easily tempted sweet tooth was so turned on by Chocolat that I headed for the nearest drug store and bought a Hershey bar. (Opens Dec. 15.) Meg Ryan's Own Rambo If Proof of Life is remembered for anything, it will be this: Russell Crowe met Meg Ryan here, knocked her right out of her Manolo Blahniks, and another Hollywood marriage became a statistic. I'm no therapist, and what the future holds for Ms. Ryan and her estranged husband, Dennis Quaid, has nothing do with movie criticism anyway, but from the seat in which I suffered through Proof of Life , I'd say it's not a movie worth leaving home for. That goes for you, too. When an American engineer (David Morse) is kidnapped by rebel guerrillas while constructing a dam in some fictitious South American country in the Andes and held for a ridiculously inflated $3 million ransom, his distraught wife (Meg Ryan) turns to a professional "K. and R." expert (Russell Crowe) to find and save him. "K. and R." means "Kidnap and Ransom," and because of the growing number of executives and tourists being abducted weekly in God-forsaken banana republics you won't find on maps, it's become a cottage industry involving spies, assassins, counter-revolutionaries, state-of-the-art weapons, armored cars, helicopters and all kinds of James Bond huggermugger you read about in magazines. (The movie is based on an article in the May 1998 issue of Vanity Fair .) Mr. Crowe is a terrific hostage negotiator, but after Ms. Ryan is abandoned by her husband's employer, her insurance company and the U.S. Embassy, he sticks around for no logical reason except that he's falling in love, despite a lack of chemistry between them that is positively mystifying. When negotiations break down, there's one option left: The fearless, two-fisted, monosyllabic one-man machine gun heads for the jungle on foot to bring the hostage back alive, while Ms. Ryan waits by her cell phone with perfectly frosted hair, biting her perfectly manicured nails. Director Taylor Hackford invests more enthusiasm in the jungle-ambush sequences and in the climbing shots in the Andes than he shows in the slow, talky exposition scenes, and the script by Tony Gilroy is filled with too much personal reflection. Ms. Ryan frets about the miscarriage she had in Africa, Mr. Crowe worries about his son's soccer game in London, Mr. Morse worries about gangrene. And we worry about how long it will take to cut to the chase. When they do, the bullets fly. But there are too many confusing subplot snafus about the military, the guerrillas who must fend them off to protect their cocaine factory and an oil pipeline that is going straight through the hostage camp. The trajectory shakily totters between action and distraction. Mr. Crowe is still pumped and buffed from Gladiator , but he never speaks above an annoying mutter. As a grief-stricken wife verging on the brink of insanity, the radiant Ms. Ryan is probably the most glamorous damsel in crisis since Garbo wafted through a cholera epidemic in China-in gowns by Adrian-in The Painted Veil . Considering that the two leads are creating well-publicized sparks on and off the screen, it's pretty odd that David Morse gives the best performance and literally steals the picture. Transporting all that personnel and equipment to England, Poland and Ecuador seems like a lot of unnecessary expense for a movie that amounts to practically nothing at all. It's the kind of thing Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell used to turn out in their sleep, and they never left the backlot at RKO. (Opens Dec. 8.) Before There Was a Bridget Jones … The House of Mirth , painstakingly directed by Britain's Terence Davies, is a thoughtful, considered rendering of the great Edith Wharton novel about social hypocrisy in 1905. For some bewildering reason, Wharton is always being compared to Jane Austen. Stylistically and thematically, she is more akin to her male literary counterpart, Theodore Dreiser; and Lily Bart, her most hauntingly tragic character, is reminiscent of George Eastman (played so memorably by Montgomery Clift in George Stevens' 1951 masterpiece A Place in the Sun ) and George Hurstwood (expertly played by Laurence Olivier in William Wyler's sensational 1952 film Carrie )-two characters who tested the social fabric of their time, with disastrously fatal results. For men and women who changed classes at the turn of the century-in either upwardly mobile moves or a downward spiral-the puritanical morals of the time dictated a fate of loss, guilt and self-torment. As a girl with no money who wants to climb the social ladder, Lily Bart is not so much a victim of ambition as she is of her own lack of skill in being a ruthless player. A girl without a dime who wanted to elevate her position in 1905 didn't have the luxury of beating society at its own game and remaining honest and virtuous at the same time. Lily (Gillian Anderson) wants cashmere, security and amusement, but she also wants romance. Half a century later, she could take classes from Lorelei Lee. The men who clamor for her affections all have one missing ingredient, and Lily holds out so long for the brass ring that her reputation is ruined. Wrongly accused of having an affair with a married man by a mean and scheming rival (played by Laura Linney, excellent as always, but in the wrong role), deserted by her fair-weather society friends, up to her pretty ears in debt for the money she lost at bridge and disinherited by her aunt, Lily meets with one misfortune after another. She refuses to settle for either living in sin or languishing conventionally in compromise, and ends up pathetically disintegrating while her life crashes and burns. It's a somber, depressing literary classic, and for the most part Mr. Davies captures Wharton's laser dissection of New York's vicious, superficial social poseurs while remaining faithful to her strong ability to develop character. But there are times when the lace curtains, parasols, ostrich plumes, ascots and silk bustles make more noise than the people themselves, who speak carefully manicured sentences in veiled undertones while we wait impatiently for them to get to the point. The boredom factor is positively treacherous. But the film is elegantly photographed and ravishingly appointed in the best Merchant Ivory tradition, and Ms. Anderson and Ms. Linney, along with Elizabeth McGovern, Eric Stoltz, Anthony LaPaglia, Dan Aykroyd and Terry Kinney (unrecognizable from his role on the gritty cable-TV series Oz ), do their best to convey the pretensions and manners of calculating women and the prissy-mouthed men as easily manipulated by them as sluggish moths. Ms. Anderson has come a long way from The X-Files , but sometimes she mistakes flaring nostrils and heaving bosoms for insight and introspection. (Opens Dec. 22.)