As cold and flu season approaches, it’s “Cholera” that you really need to watch out for right now. All the more disastrous given the prestige background of “Love in the Time of Cholera,” today’s feature film adaptation of one of the quintessential and most beloved pieces of Latin American literature of all time festers in nearly every aspect.
It uses mostly Latino actors speaking English with heavy Spanish accents in hopes that this nod alone is enough to signify a genuine sense of native ethnicity. But the bland whitewash fails to capture the specific sense of time (late 1800s to early 1900s) and place (a storybook South American port city), or the cultural trademark of magical realism that made Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s landmark novel such a sensation in the late 1980s and beyond. It was filmed on location in Columbia; it looks as if it came out of a stock Hollywood backlot.
Worse than dishonoring its transporting roots, journeyman director Mike Newell (“Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Harry Potter and theGoblet of Fire”) and screenwriter Ronald Harwood have somehow managed to milk the feelings of epic grandeur and romantic hunger out of a narrative specifically about a tortuous love that lasts more than 50 years. Poor casting, the glossed-over condensation of numerous plot points into soapy melodrama and a marked lack of erotic energy make it no more impacting than some bad costume TV miniseries from a couple of decades ago.
Told in flashback, with a weakened Javier Bardem playing modern lit’s ultimate desperate lover Florentino Ariza as an adult, the movie begins as a forbidden crush between socially mismatched teenagers.
Florentino is played in his younger incarnation by Unax Ugalde, obviously chosen more for his physical resemblance to Bardem than his ability to make a swoon-worthy Lothario.
He shares almost no chemistry with the insipid, unlikable Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno, who plays Florentino’s lifetime love object Fermina throughout the film. And since we don’t believe in or care about their initial spark as paramours, we also don’t get invested in the next half-century of his numerous pointless affairs — shrunken into a 140-minute running time that only seems that long — and her ho-hum marriage to a one-dimensional spoilsport (Benjamin Bratt) until they can attempt to find each other again as senior citizens.
It’s hard to remember a picture coming from such polished source material being so limp. The ensemble includes Catalina Sandino Moreno and Liev Schreiber as two of its few positive contributors, but John Leguizamo stands out for his rabidly overdone performance as Fermina’s disapproving father. He’s so unambiguously bad; it puts the taste of the filmmaker into question at a whole other level.
After being put through director Newell’s shredder, a classic book on “Love” becomes hateful.
‘Love in the Time of Cholera’
*
Starring:Javier Bardem, Benjamin Bratt, Giovanna Mezzogiorno
Director: Mike Newell
Rated R for sexual content/nudity and brief language
Running time: 140 minutes
