Fifty Years of Sex, A Lifetime of Love
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Mike Newell’s adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera” is tolerable only because its momentary blip on the cultural radar might lead people to the book. Seeing the movie itself is inadvisable, even for fans of turn-of-the-century period romances, Javier Bardem, location shooting in Cartagena, Colombia, or, especially, Mr. Márquez’s work. Mr. Newell extinguishes the flame at the heart of “Love” by reducing the novel to a shy, abiding romance and producing, most astonishingly, something almost cliché.
Mr. Bardem, who is uncharacteristically stiff throughout the film, plays the novel’s epic torch-carrier, Florentino Ariza. This young telegraph clerk (at first played in his teenage years by Unax Ugalde) falls from afar for Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), the daughter of a crass merchant (John Leguizamo) who wants more genteel suitors for his daughter. When Fermina finally marries the smooth Dr. Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt, in a fierce goatee), Florentino begins a lifelong romantic vigil for her, channeling his physical energies into Wilt Chamberlain-level tallies of sexual experience.
Like the book, the movie actually begins with the apparent end of the saga: The doctor, in middle age, widows Fermina by falling off a ladder while fetching a parrot. Thus freed, Florentino comes recourting 50 years on. With Fermina’s subsequent enraged, grief-stricken rejection as a tragic frame, the story then leaps back to lead us through how their lives diverged. The parallel tracking comes courtesy of veteran screenwriter Ronald Harwood, who won an Oscar for his work on “The Pianist” and who also adapted “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (itself a nested scheme of switchbacks).
Mr. Harwood’s adaptation, abetted by Mr. Newell’s predictable and deflating approach to building scenes, boils Mr. Márquez’s work down to a string of heavy-handed episodes and spotlighted epigrams on love. As Fermina grows into the stolid, enduring love of marriage, the writerly Florentino fusses his life away in an eccentric rut of one-night stands and clerking duties, before accidentally inheriting a whole shipping business. Whatever one can sense of Mr. Bardem’s soulful yearning is snuffed out by Florentino’s passionate forays, which are often tweaked into cutesy semi-farce.
Though all the suits, dresses, and forgotten colonial bourgeois trappings are in order, “Love in the Time of Cholera” is visually inert. Maybe it’s too much to ask for an analogue to Mr. Márquez’s living prose, and adapting material so identified with a particular literary style and mood poses unique challenges. But Mr. Newell’s production is complacent in its routine respectability, and when the movie’s finale lets loose with a shimmering panorama of a heartland river, the almost hallucinatory effect betrays both our own deprivation and the filmmakers’ faintly amused misunderstanding of the story’s spirit.
The film is stingy with sensation, but “Love” steams toward a literal-minded horizon of nearly two-and-a-half hours (until you might feel the actors’ splotchy age makeup sticking to your face, too). Florentino’s lovers (including Laura Harring as a widow) register as a parade of improbable sketches. And the intriguing character of Florentino’s mother (Fernanda Montenegro), who once tenderly indulged her lovelorn son by shipping him off to the boondocks, gets short shrift.
Even though the Nobel Prize-winning Mr. Márquez has written mediocre screenplays in his time, it’s hard to imagine him being too sympathetic to such a timid adaptation. So many scenes lapse into conventional sentiment or nervously humorous understatement that the task of compensating with memories from the novel becomes too tall. Above all, “Love in the Time of Cholera” shouldn’t be ordinary: Though Florentino’s long-distance, long-suffering love certainly is not, a film like this can almost make it feel that way.