Until now, none of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s million-seller novels have been filmed for the international market, and with good reason. The Colombian author’s texts tread a fine line between earnest melodrama and magical realism. What springs eloquent on paper risks appearing sudsy on screen, and so it is with Mike Newell’s adaptation of this epic assault on the illness of love. That he tackles the material as a straight-line narrative is the first of many problems.
It’s Columbia circa 1870, and young Florentino (Javier Bardem) learns that he is destined to love Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). Her protective father (John Leguizamo), however, breaks the spell, enabling his daughter to marry Dr. Urbino (Benjamin Bratt) and live an uncomplicated life. Five decades pass, Dr. Urbino dies, and old Florentino finally makes his move.
The essence of love is found in the margins. Or it would be if there were any margins. Sumptuous design is the only distraction from Newell’s chronic and persistent mishandling of the material. Riddled with hoot-worthy dialogue ('Shoot me! There is no greater glory than to die for love!"), this is Latin romanticism writ large. It requires a lightness of touch to coax airy themes from the somewhat ridiculous reality of Florentino’s obsession. Instead, Love In The Time Of Cholera hits the deck hard. The whimsy that allowed a film like, say, Chocolat to fly enabled greater expression. Newell (Four Weddings And A Funeral, Donnie Brasco) misses the point and opts for surging melodrama and unpersuasive old-age makeup to tell it like it is. Bardem struggles to convince that he’s twenty, much less eighty, and his co-stars fare no better. Unlike the unfilmable novel, Newell’s discordant picture exhibits the worst symptoms of fever itself: unpleasant to endure and then quickly forgotten.
Sloppy, corny and poorly constructed, Mike Newell’s adaptation of the classic novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is pretty much wrongheaded from beginning to end.
Filmink 2/5
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