Dir. Mike Newell, US, 2007, 138 mins
Cast: Javier Bardem, Giovanna Mezzorno, Benjamin Bratt
Review by Carol Allen
With Nobel prizewinner Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel as the source material, two recent Oscar winners on board (writer Ronald Harwood and actor Bardem) and a seasoned veteran such as Newell in the director's chair, expectations are justifiably high for this movie. The result though is disappointing.
In fairness, it is a very good looking film. Cinematographer Affonso Beator and production designer Wolf Kroeger have done a good job in capturing the magnificence of the Colombian landscape, and creating the bustle of the streets and the lifestyle of the society before and after the turn of the 20th century. But the story itself seems too slight to hold the attention for over two and a half hours.
Bardem plays Florentino, a telegraph clerk, who is smitten at first sight as a young man by Fermina (Mezzogiorno). Her father Lorenzo (John Leguizamo) is furious at the liaison and speedily removes his daughter to the countryside. Later she marries the aristocratic and handsome doctor Juvenal (Bratt), who sweeps her off to Paris for several years. Meanwhile, Florentino becomes a wealthy ship owner with the help of his uncle. He consoles himself with a series of sexual encounters but for fifty years remains faithful in his heart to his true love.
The film opens with the death of Juvenal, giving Florentino the chance to pursue his suit once more. It's a somewhat unfortunate opening with the three main actors in heavy and unconvincing "age" make up and the two men making more like doddery ninety year olds than the still vigorous seventy somethings they're supposed to be. When we then go into flashback for the early years of the love affair, things look up with handsome young Colombian actor Unax Ugalde rather good as the teenage Florentino. It is therefore a bit of a shock when he is abruptly transformed into Bardem, who as the adult Florentino looks a bit like a clerk from a Charles Dickens novel inexplicably transported to Columbia. Excellent actor though he is, Bardem is miscast in the role. He is too strong and solid to convince as a man prepared to spend his life pining unrealistically after a lost love, although his story is enlivened by his often comic sexual encounters. One hopes they are intended to be comic, as some of the dialogue is unintentionally so. The timeline of the film is also confusing. We are left to guess from the costumes what year we are in and both the cholera epidemic, which gives the film its title and the civil war going on in the background are irritatingly glossed over with no context or detail. The film could also have done with more time spent on the relationship between Fermina and Juvenal and less on the Florentino's rather uninteresting partner free life.
On the plus side Mezzogiorno handles the passing years for her character well, Bratt is surprisingly convincing in his Spanishness, and there are good performances from Fernanda Montenegro (Central Station) as Florentino's mother and Hector Elizondo as his uncle.
Marquez apparently took a lot of persuading to allow his novel to be made into an English language film and his doubts appear to have been justified. There are plenty of now big name Spanish speaking directors around, such as Alfonso Cuaron, Alejandro Amenabar and Alejandro Gonazalez Inarritu. Had it been made by a Hispanic team in Spanish, it is possible that the novel might have made a more convincing film.
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