Misstropolis

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Love in the Time of Cholera

by Tom Meek

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Love in the Time of Cholera (’’El amor en los tiempos del cólera’’) is the celebrated novel by Gabriel García Márquez about a fifty-year love triangle set at the turn of the twentieth century. I’ll admit that the first time I read the novel I labored a bit. I was not magically transported, as I’ve heard so many describe, but rather distracted by a desire for the characters to shut up and act. But that was the first time. Later, older, and ready for it, I experienced that magic, and fell under the novel’s spell.

Newell, who’s directed everything from Enchanted April to Donnie Brasco to Pushing Tin, has received harsh reviews from critics for his heavy-handed, unimaginative adaptation of the subtle literary work.

Wesley Morris wrote in The Boston Globe “… the movie doesn’t work, because Harwood and Newell never figured how to transport the book’s moving ironic essence: that love blooms amid so much corporeal decay. The heart may want what the heart wants, but the body - stinky, spotted, and unreliable after all those years - has a different agenda. Little of the fragile wisdom with which García Márquez imbued that idea has survived this timid Hollywood treatment.”

In my opinion, the film is not as much of a disaster as everybody’s saying it is. While it’s true that Newell was an unfortunate choice for the job, he does do some things well. He elicits the lush imagery from cinematographer Affonso Beato that gives turn-of-the-century Columbia a paradoxical sheen of vitality in the face of a ravaging plague; and he does evoke an alluring yet reserved sensuality from Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno. She plays the central character Fermina Daza. The one, who as García Márquez has stated, is “… the strong one… She is the novel.”

I’m not saying the film doesn’t have its near fatal flaws. One of the most woeful is the performance by John Leguizamo as Fermina’s father Lorenzo Daza. In the novel he’s a well-respected merchant and the patriarch of the family, but onscreen he buzzes around like a wanton barfly. The men who play Fermina’s lovers, Benjamin Bratt and Javier Bardem aren’t quite the titans of passion Márquez described either. Bratt’s Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who wins Fermina’s hand under orders from her father, never captures the subtle seriousness and grace of the novel’s character.

As is the case with all of his films - including No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers’ film he’s also currently starring in - Javier Bardem stands out. He does as much as he can to bring Florentino, the most challenging and symbolic character in the novel and the anti-hero to Dr. Urbino, to life. He is the sexual, comedic and passionate driver of the film. Yet Bardem’s performance is not enough to rescue Newell’s adaptation. For all his proclaimed love of the original, the director loses the sense of magical realism in Márquez’s work. Florentino becomes too forlorn a soul, suffering through the years with more and more aging makeup and thicker prosthetics.

I never thought I would quote Roger Ebert, but his thoughts on the adaptation are worth repeating, “Gabo’s work may really live only there on the page, with his lighthearted badinage between the erotic and the absurd, the tragic and the magical. If you extract the story without the language, you are left with dust and bones but no beating heart.”

Somehow Bardem and Newell get us to believe in the eternal power of true love, though the production can feel like a shaky circus act. Use the release of the film as an excuse to re-read the book.