For many years, Gabriel Garcia Marquez resisted all attempts
by Hollywood studios to obtain the rights to his 1985 novel "Love in the Time
of Cholera," perhaps believing that a movie could never do justice to his
intricately latticed work. In 2004, however, faced with mounting hospital bills
and an expensive, failed newspaper venture, the 79-year-old Nobel Prize
laureate finally consented. Mike Newell's new movie is the unfortunate result,
making Marquez lovers wish he had held on a little longer.

It makes a certain amount of sense that director Mike Newell
took on the formidable challenge of bringing Marquez's expansive novel to life,
as he succeeded at bringing a taut and punchy "Harry Potter and the Goblet of
Fire" to the screen. Paired with Ronald Harwood's ("The Pianist") melodramatic
screenplay, however, Newell goes too far in paring "Cholera" down, ending up
with a ham-handed, streamlined telling of the novel stripped of the original's
complexity, warmth and charm.

The movie begins in Cartagana, Colombia, with the freak
death of Dr. Juvenal Urbino, played by Benjamin Bratt
("Thumbsucker") as he attempts to retrieve his parrot from a mango tree. His
wife, Fermina Urbino, played by Giovanna
Mezzogiorno, ("La Finestra di fronte") is then approached after
Urbino's funeral by Florentino Ariza avier Bardem, "No Country
For Old Men"), who has waited "51 years, nine months and four days" for her
husband to die, so that he and Fermina can continue their class-transgressing courtship.
We then go back to 1878, outlining the formative years of Fermina and
Florentino, their first meeting and their furtive, clandestine romance of
exchanged letters. Fermina's protective uncle, Lorenzo Daza soon discovers
their plot and whisks her away to the countryside.

The film, shot on location in Colombia, is requisitely lush,
the historical costuming is colorful and authentic, and the music adds
atmosphere without ever being intrusive (even three original Shakira songs
recorded exclusively for the movie at Marquez's request).

However, the acting of the main characters never
lives up to these high production values. John Leguizamo ("Ice Age") is either
incredible or incredibly awful as the over-the-top Lorenzo Daza, scowling
through a fat cigar and seething with venom even when buttering his bread, as
if he's a mustache-twirling villain in a Colombian melodrama. Bardem plays
Florentino as the palest, most emotionally unstable boy in all of Colombia,
and his chemistry with Mezzogiorno
never develops; every line is awkward and forced.

More than stilted acting, what is lost in the novel's
conversion to film is the moral ambiguity of the characters. In the book, it is
unclear if Florentino should be celebrated for his "faithfulness" to a single
woman for half a century, or if instead he should be pitied as a pathetic
dreamer, his relentless pursuit of an unobtainable woman (and his parallel
quest for lost gold on the bottom of the sea, omitted in the movie), the
product of mental illness that runs in the family and eventually does in his
mother. Likewise, Fermina's marriage of convenience with Urbino eventually
grows into genuine love, and it is left to the reader to decide if an uncertain
future with Florentino would actually have brought Fermina more happiness than
Urbino's economic and domestic stability.

Instead, the characters are depicted, despite the flowering
setting, in black and white. Bratt plays Urbino as uncomfortably slick and
pragmatic while the audience is compelled to cheer on Florentino, who
alternates repetitively between idle womanizing and dour-faced doom and gloom.

As a result of all this seriousness, the moments of quirk
that do make it through the adaptation often come off as unexplained and odd in
a movie otherwise played so straight. Florentino is seen munching on the
gardenias in his garden as he reads Fermina's letters, though the film never
explains he does this so that he can know the taste of her skin.

Even the story's central symbol of cholera — its
deteriorating effects compared to the lovesickness of Florentino — is left
largely unexplained, the few artless references coming across as cryptic and serving
a well-worn dichotomy between love and death.

Despite the film's numerous missteps, it never comes to a
complete halt. Marquez, the pioneer of magical realism, adapted its suspension
of disbelief to the romance genre, with Florentino having sexual encounters
with a staggering 622 different women (magically evading accidental pregnancies
and STDs at the same time, considering this isn't "Love in the Time of
Condoms") — a number he continually updates in his notebook of experiences and lessons.

At least in these vignettes Newell breaks from Hollywood
type, filming what is surely some of the most democratic sex scenes in cinema
this side of "Shortbus" (read: the camera does not shy away from the elderly in
the nude). And the story, even removed of much of its compelling subject
matter, still retains a certain enchanting power. All in all, however, this is
a failed attempt that will only make newcomers wonder what all the fuss is
about, and infuriate readers of the novel who hoped to see a glimmer of its
imagination captured on the screen.

2 stars out of 5