Words fail me. There’s a certain kind of twisted logic to it: a novel about the persistence of love has turned, in the hands of a mediocre director, into a a campy, puffed-up piece of rotten Oscar bait, a movie of such boundless badness that it would take somebody with a Nobel Prize in literature to truly fathom the extent of its wretchedness. Gabriel García Márquez’s 1985 novel is an impossibly sustained lyrical romance of unfulfilled love that stretches over decades, set among the lush vegetation and brimming cities of the Colombian coast. With his adaptation, Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) demonstrates that there’s more to Garcia Marquez than extravagant plotting: without the master’s ineffable touch, even his most fertile fictions turn to dust.
The story’s all there: in the late 19th century, the young clerk Florentino Ariza (Javier Bardem) falls in desperate love with the beautiful Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), but her father (John Leguziamo) interferes, and she marries Dr. Urbino (Benjamin Bratt) instead. Undaunted, Florentino decides to wait for her, no matter how long it will take. In the novel, Garcia Marquez fills the intervening years with outrageous and obsessively detailed anecdotes and labyrinthine detours rendered in extraordinary language, but Newell gives us nothing but a few dusty costumes, uninspired direction, and — instead of subtitles — Spanish accents that are supposed to communicate some sort of foreignness.
For the teenage Florentino, Newell uses a different actor (Unax Ugalde), but when the star-crossed lovers turn old, he just covers them with layers of ridiculous make-up. Were there no aging actors available that could have given the septuagenarian Fermina and Florentino a bit of desperately needed verisimilitude? Even worse, the film is completely tone-deaf when it comes to Garcia Marquez’s mingling of ruefulness and bawdiness. Newell plays all the wrong dramatic moments for laughs and mistrusts the romance to such a degree that he slathers every emotional cue with a syrupy score that makes identification with the characters impossible. As Fermina’s confidante, the wonderful Catalina Sandino Moreno (Maria Full of Grace) is not only wasted but, for the later part of the story, has to suffer the indignity of a fat suit.
But enough. It’s fruitless to count the ways in which Love in the Time of Cholera fails. Critics’ screenings here in New York are usually quiet affairs where you can get shushed for looking at the screen funny, but at the one I attended, people were talking back at the movie, Rocky Horror-style. Love in the Time of Cholera is scheduled to open on November 16.
Love in the Time of Cholera. Mike Newell, 2007. *
- Reading Love in the Time of Cholera
- The Painted Veil also features broken hearts and a deadly disease
- If you must, here’s the trailer
Mike Newell is a pretty bland director — I’ve never liked anything he’s done, except for Donnie Brasco which is effing brilliant. Go figure.
You couldn’t wait to write this review could you? You probably already had it written before you saw the film.
It’s obvious you came into the theater wanting to hate British Mike Newell for directing an adaptation of Colombian Garcia Marquez’s novel. No one criticized Cuaron for directing GREAT EXPECTATIONS just because he was a Mexican directing a British classic.
In your first paragraph you take a shot at the director, then romanticize the book by putting it on an unobtainable pedestal.
Then you go on to give a synopsis of the story and critcism for the film not being in Spanish. You even say “Garcia Marquez fills the intervening years with outrageous and obsessively detailed anecdotes and labyrinthine detours rendered in extraordinary language.” Are you kidding me? Are you saying his novel does not have an intellegent structure but it is just well written anecdotes and detours?
Next you criticize the director for using make-up to age the actors instead of hiring several pairs of actors to convey the 50 year aging process they go through, as if this is the first time it’s ever been done in a film. Have you ever seen a movie? Do you know that movies have stars and those stars usually continue as the lead actors from beginning to end? Then you say the film is not as rueful or bawdy as GGM’s novel. I think his novel is funny and human, not some cheesy sex comedy like it seems you’re asking this film to be. This may be why you think the Newell plays the dramatic moments for laughs and relies on the score for emotion. And I’m sure you’re just pissed that Catalina Sandino Moreno is not the star of the film so you are criticizing her aging as well.
Instead of taking lazy, misinformed shots at the director based on prejudice against the film going in, maybe you should watch the film with fresh eyes, open to its intelligent design. Not going in wanting a Rocky Horror Picture Show. In reading your bio I expected you to be a thoughtful critic. Your new assignment should be to write a review of the film that criticizes it critically – not with an opening line of “words fail me.” Because if that’s the case, what are you doing writing a review in the first place?
poeticvillain,
quick question: have you seen the movie? It would make discussing it a lot easier, and many of the problems you’re having with my review would get instantly cleared up. I’m never looking to not like a movie, but if it’s as bad as this one, there’s not much I can do.
There seem to be a few misunderstandings here, too. I never attack Newell for his nationality, but his mediocrity. Yes, the language is a problem because the accents take me out of the story, and so does the lousy make-up. I’ve seen enough movies to know that actors can be made to age with make-up, or they can be played by older actors. This movie took the make-up route, and it’s not working.
I also never said the novel isn’t well structured; I’m saying that Garcia Marquez tells the byzantine developments, especially of Florintine’s conquests, with extraordinary language, but Newell didn’t find a cinematic equivalent, so we’re left with a “cheesy sex comedy” — which the book isn’t.
Anyway, it seems to me that you’re intentionally misreading much of what I’m saying, perhaps because you’ve already decided you’ll like the movie. If you’d like to defend Love in the Time of Cholera on its own terms, please don’t hesitate.
Saw this film yesterday. Sadly, I felt that it’s the long-awaited sequel to Heaven’s Gate.