Reading the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel “Love in the Time of Cholera” is like enjoying a fine wine or expensive chocolate. It is to be savored, not downed in one gulp. Only through an extended period of time can you cherish Marquez’s languorous pace and dream-like imagery. Unfortunately, the new film adaptation of the novel does it a great disservice with its sluggish pace, silly acting and bad makeup.
If you haven’t read the book, “Love in the Time of Cholera” tells the story of Florentino Ariza (Javier Bardem, “Before Night Falls,” “No Country For Old Men”) and Fermina Daza (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), who meet as young adults and have a short romance through letter writing. Fermina’s father Lorenzo (John Leguizamo, “Moulin Rouge,” “Ice Age”) opposes the match and moves Fermina back to her hometown. Upon returning some years later, she rejects Florentino, who has pledged eternal fidelity to her.
To deal with his unrequited love, Florentino has hundreds of wild sexual encounters. Meanwhile, Fermina marries Dr. Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt, “Traffic,” “Thumbsucker”) and becomes a respected lady of the community.
The two continue on these paths until Dr. Urbino dies and Florentino repeats his vow of eternal fidelity to a reluctant Fermina.
Respectably, the film stays true to the novel’s setup. It begins with the death of Dr. Urbino and then flashes back to the many years Florentino spent pining for Fermina before returning to her at the doctor’s funeral. But the benefit of reading a meticulously slow novel is that you can set it down and pick it up again later. However, a feature film has no such advantage, and so the movie adaptation of “Love in the Time of Cholera” suffers.
Sadly, it also suffers from numerous examples of over-exaggerated acting. Much of the performances of the tragically miscast Bardem and Mezzogiorno feel like they were mimicked from a bad novella on Telemundo.
Surprisingly, Benjamin Bratt shines as the confident doctor who saves a community from cholera. His charming smile and demeanor are enough to win you over, even though you’re supposed to be rooting for underdog Florentino.
Hector Elizondo, who plays Florentino’s uncle, and John Leguizamo are predictably fun to watch and bring a more natural humor to the grave (but sometimes unintentionally funny) proceedings.
Indeed, this film provokes a lot of unintentional laughter. The characters all seem to be aging at different rates, thanks to a number of horrible makeup choices. The caked-on age makeup is distracting in scenes with extreme close-ups and laughable when some characters appear inconsistently older than others.
The accents of the actors are spotty at best. It would have been better to cast unknowns of the same ethnic background than to have Americans, Italians, Peruvians and others attempting to sound alike. Leguizamo’s accent is particularly atrocious, as he often sounds like he just stepped off the New York City subway.
Though the film is dragged down by a number of bad choices, director Mike Newell once again proves his adept hand with visual style. Newell also directed “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” and “Mona Lisa Smile,” both of which were aesthetically beautiful. Newell has more than enough to work with here, as he lavishes the countryside with sweeping wide shots. However, one can’t help but feel that fellow-Harry Potter director Alfonso Cuaron (“Y Tu Mama Tambien,” “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” “Children of Men”) would have done a superior job with the source material.
Though the film boasts an impressive soundtrack (featuring three decent songs from Shakira, commissioned by Gabriel Garcia Marquez himself) and lovely aesthetics, the bad vastly outweighs the good in this adaptation, which buckles under its own weight. “Love in the Time of Cholera” is best enjoyed in its original literary form, as the movie simply cannot compare.
