IF you’ve seen “Gone With the Wind,” you’ve seen what “Love in the Time of Cholera” isn’t.
Did “Gone With the Wind” have more than three characters who mattered? Did you know the name of the war everyone was fighting? Did the breathtakingly romantic love scene happen before the lovers turned 80?
Director Mike Newell (“Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”) turns the 1985 Gabriel Garcia Marquez classic into a telenovela.
At the outset we learn that two oldsters finally unite after one of them, Fermina Daza, loses her husband. Or they try to: She slaps him when her old flame tells her he’s been waiting for this moment for “51 years, nine months and four days,” which is also the running time of the film.
Flashing back half a century, a lad called Florentino, a telegraph clerk in 19th-century Colombia, spots beauteous Fermina Daza (Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno) and begins writing her love notes the length of “Finnegans Wake.” She swoons at his words – enraging her father (John Leguizamo), who moves her to the country to cool her jets. He steers her toward a dashing doctor (Benjamin Bratt).
After a few years, she comes back to the city, her father having declared her mistress of her own fate. Two odd things happen. Though Femina is still played by the same actress, Florentino is now played by a different actor (Javier Bardem) who little resembles the guy who played him as a stripling. Bardem, who is 38 but looks 50, can’t pull off early 20s, and his stone-carved features are made to terrorize the screen (see “No Country for Old Men”), not make love to it. Gael Garcia Bernal would have been the ideal choice.
Also, Fermina rejects Florentino for vague reasons. For the next hour, as she marries the Bratt character and Florentino becomes a rich businessman, the framing device used at the outset kills the suspense. We simply wait for Fermina to be widowed and for Florentino to renew his courtship of her.
Miscellaneous wars and cholera epidemics and secondary characters come and go without much affecting things.
The movie, populated with good actors who aren’t Latino (Liev Schreiber as a Colombian?) and bad actors who are (Leguizamo really ought to be selling shoes by now), doesn’t convince us either that Fermina and Florentino are made for each other or that tragic forces are keeping them apart.
She is married, but so what? There is lots of infidelity in the movie. Moreover, though Florentino writes poetry that is either romantic or laughable depending on how closely your sensibility resembles that of a Bard College sophomore, he may not be your idea of a steadfast inamorato: To console himself while waiting for her husband to die, he takes 632 lovers over five decades. There’s consolation, there’s indulgence, and then there’s Wilt Chamberlain.
Not that Florentino seems like a lady magnet. For all of his poetry and his eventual wealth, he seems a bit of a damp sponge. He’s the kind of guy you’d dump for a bad boy like the hard case Bardem plays in “No Country for Old Men” – who would have shot Florentino between the eyeballs on grounds of general wimpiness.
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA
Running time: 138 minutes. Rated R (nudity, sex, profanity). At the Lincoln Square, the E- Walk, the Kips Bay, others.