A lot of the great delight of reading an writer like Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the truth that you're reading him that you're granting yourself to turn absorbed in his flamboyant phraseology and bright descriptions, that he's taking you to a amply realized lieu, and that you're knuckling under, gladly.
When a author phonation is as distinguishing as the Colombian Nobel Prize winner's, it's hard to duplicate it on-screen, even though director Mike Newell and screenwriter Ronald Harwood remain for the most part loyal to "Love in the Time of Cholera" in their wildly blemished version of Garcia Marquez' brooming 1985 novel about a decades-old loving fixation.
Harwood won an Academy Award for his version of "The Pianist"; here, he conserves much of the master copy dialogue, but the signification and emotion behind it is often oddly deficient. So when the graceful Dr. Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt) guarantees his pure bride (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) on their honeymoon, "This is going to be a example in love," a line that might have looked palatable on the page clangs on the ear alternatively.
Likewise, the unhappy Florentino Ariza, insufficiently fleshed out without the benefit of pages upon pages of cover story, comes off as a maddened prowler, a guy who needs to get a life (as well as a sturdier stomach). This, in spite of that he's acted by Javier Bardem, an role player who's demonstrated time and over again that he has a outstanding capability for subtlety (to see Bardem at his absolute best, verify his alarming turn in "No Country for Old Men").
Told principally in cut back, "Cholera" abides by the 51 years, 9 months and 4 days from the time the young cable clerk Florentino first professes his love for the apparently unachievable schoolgirl Fermina Daza (Mezzogiorno) until he catches up with her once again following the unplanned decease of her hubby (Bratt).
During that span, he takes 622 lovers (he keeps a running list of them in his diary) but longs for Fermina no matter of his comrade. (One of them is played with adorable vulnerability by Laura Harring, who's lamentably underused. We also see too little of Liev Schreiber as Florentino's chief and Fernanda Montenegro as his mom.)
Fermina, in the meantime, decided to hook up with the wealthy and far more socially satisfactory Dr. Urbino; she's lived a prosperous life with him and hasn't thought of Florentino much till he comes out at her hubby funeral, anticipates them to pick up where they left off.
Newell ("Donnie Brasco," "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire") is all over the place in conditions of tone Garcia Marquez realized the innate absurdity of his characters, while Newell plays it direct but he does carry out the motions attractively with the help of cameraman Alfonso Beato. The jungles are lush, the urban shots are suitably teeming with humanity and the homes, apparels and carriages of turn-of-the-century Cartagena are elaborately rough-textured, as you'd anticipate from any monumental period drama such as this.
It's the actors themselves who all too often feel out of place.
Mezzogiorno is distractingly miscast as Fermina: adorable, yes, but too old to act her as a adolescent and too young to be credible as a gray-haired widow. (The film producer* wisely went with a junior actor, Unax Ugalde, to play Florentino as a teenage.) Her portrait of the character, who's alleged to be imperturbable in her arrogance, is also amazingly neutral. Is this rather timid and personality-free Fermina the kind of woman for whom Florentino would pine for over half a century?
Making matters worse is the coming of Catalina Sandino Moreno ("Maria Full of Grace"), who's so wicked and hot and vibrant as Fermina's adventuresome cousin, Hildebranda, she makes you wish she'd been cast in the lead. And John Leguizamo, over-the-top as Fermina's protective father, sounds ridiculously more like a New Yorker than the Colombian he is by birth.
The master copy songs from Shakira, who's also from Columbia, are a nice touch, though. Come to think of it, she'd be more entertaining to see in the character of Fermina, as well.
"Love in the Time of Cholera," a New Line Cinema release, is rated R for sexual content/nudity and brief language. Running time: 138 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.
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