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Movie Review
Marquez adaptation lacks “magical realism” and any magic!
Love in the Time of Cholera
2:53 pm Nov 17 - by Syd Slobodnik – Buzz Writer
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1 Star Out of 4
How incredibly disappointing it is for three very talented filmmakers, director Mike Newell, Oscar winning screenwriter Ronald “The Pianist” Harwood, and actor Javier Bardem to completely drop the ball in making a screen adaptation of the famed Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel Love in the Time of Cholera.
This lackluster telling of the 50 year painful romance of unrequited love between a simple Columbian man and the beautiful woman of his dreams plays like bad Masterpiece Theatre and a cheap overwritten romance novel. What’s worse is the film seems to be completely void of human emotion, passion and poetic imagery for which the novel in known.
Set in the last decades of the 19th Century and trickling into the early part of the 20th, Love in the Time of Cholera sets the audience up for a lavish historical romantic spectacle - almost like a Latin American Gone With the Wind. Florentino Ariza (Bardem) falls for Fermina Urbino, (played by Italian newcomer Giovanna Mezzogiorno), at first sight, but is quickly restricted access to her by her possessive father. Fermina then breaks Florentino’s heart when she marries a handsome doctor who comes to care for her one day. In order to deal with the pain, Florentino makes a vow that he would one day be with his true love - even if it takes forever. In the meantime, Florentino embarks on an endless series of passionless carnal experiences, which he chronicles in a diary.
Newell, who proved years before his skill in handling a story of long term unrequited love in Four Weddings and a Funeral, misses almost all opportunities at making a believable love story. Dressed in a black suit and bowler hat, Bardem reminds one more of the famed Mexican actor/comedian Catinflas, than a romantic lead. He is so pathetically whinny in scenes where Florentino’s mother consoles his broken soul you nearly want to slap him. Other actors are simply cardboard reflections of South American stereotypes: Mezzogiorno’s pretty maiden, John Lequizamo’s obsessive father, and Benjamin Bratt’s handsomely strong Dr. Urbino. They show no passion, and you simply just don’t care about their fates.
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