Ill-Informed Gadfly

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel “Love in the Time of Cholera,” a quirky love story that spans more than half a century, has been called unfilmable. The movie version proves the warnings were spot-on. Mike Newell’s plodding, literal-minded adaptation will induce crushing despair in lovers of literature and cinema. It has no flair, no verve. Newell, who got his start in British television in the mid-60s, is at best a competent craftsman with a touch for comedy who works well with actors. Give him a good script, and he won’t screw it up: “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and “Donnie Brasco” are the highlights of his long career. More recently, he helmed a bloated and desultory entry in the Harry Potter series, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.” If Newell was intimidated by J.K. Rowling — his Potter movie had rolls of fat that needed trimming — imagine his reluctance to upstage Marquez.

I haven’t read the book — I’m eager to do so now, so the dreadful movie doesn’t unfairly sully my perception of it — but I can only imagine it’s heavy on interior monologue and stylized language. Newell, though, does nothing with the camera to approximate the author’s voice. (By comparison, Jonathan Demme, in the unjustly maligned “Beloved,” takes visual risks to capture the emotional impact of Toni Morrison’s hothouse prose — it doesn’t always work, but at least he tries.)

Newell and screenwriter Ronald Harwood (who was much more successful adapting “The Pianist” and “Oliver Twist” for Roman Polanski) simply mine Marquez’s narrative for incident after incident, the significance of which is often difficult to discern. Worse still is the way they handle little details that probably illuminate character in the novel. We learn that the heroine, Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), has an overdeveloped sense of smell and despises eggplant, yet Newell’s presentation of these quirks is so flat and perfunctory that I wonder why he bothered. I can only conclude that they were important to Marquez. Newell has no choice but to keep them in, because otherwise Fermina risks fading into abstraction.

Newell can’t synchronize acting styles, either. He pulls together a cast from all over the Spanish-speaking world (save for Mezzogiorno, who’s Italian). Javier Bardem stars as the meek, lovelorn Florentino; Benjamin Bratt is the doctor who marries his beloved Fermina; John Leguizamo is her father; Catalina Sandino Moreno is her country cousin; and so on. The great Bardem embarrasses himself by taking over too soon for a younger actor and playing the lovelorn Florentino at 25 or so; he’s so eager to look young and, well, eager, that the strain becomes evident. Later he grows into the role. Florentino, a whimpering mama’s boy in his youth, matures into a mild-mannered but prolific lover. Bardem lets us understand why Florentino is so good with women: He’s attentive and gentle, a good listener who’s unthreatening to women because he wants nothing from them. His heart still belongs to Fermina.

The rest of the actors are all over the map. Bratt struts and preens in high costume-drama style; Leguizamo shouts and spits as the hot-blooded Latino patriarch; and Mezzogiorno offers a high-strung, flighty, anachronistic performance. (She was fantastic in the contemporary Italian romantic comedy “The Last Kiss” but struggles to adapt to a period piece.) Meanwhile, the scintillating Sandino Moreno knows exactly what to do: She vamps it up like Rita Hayworth. She’s wasted in a throwaway role; she disappears for an hour before appearing in old-age makeup that dampens her effervescence.

The old-age makeup itself is a travesty. I’m sure many directors turned down the chance to film this book because the tenderly romantic climax occurs when the lead characters are in their 70s. There’s no good way to do this; either you cast different actors or you ugly up your stars with wigs and fake wrinkles. That’s what Newell does. Then he exacerbates it by shooting the final act almost entirely in closeup. The makeup can’t stand up to such scrutiny. Fernando and Fermina don’t look like lovelorn geriatrics so much as meth addicts on their way to a costume party.

God, what a disaster. Newell’s idea of erotic heat is to throw in a pair of naked breasts every once in a while. The audience gets so desperate that limp sight gags get laughs. We get no coherent sense of the passing of time. The story supposedly unfolds amid a backdrop of war and cholera, but they’re mere rumors to Newell. “Love in the Time of Cholera” is as limp a prestige piece as you’re likely to see, a cautionary tale that illustrates everything that can go wrong when a tricky novel is adapted for the screen.