Marquez Hits the Marquee

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA
Running Time 138 minutes
Written by Ronald Harwood
Directed by Mike Newell
Starring Javier Bardem, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, John Leguizamo and Benjamin Bratt

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian novelist who lives and writes in Mexico City, is not easy to adapt for the screen. His Nobel Prize-winning opus Love in the Time of Cholera, a sprawling but clutter-free saga about 53 years of an unrequited love that survives the political, emotional and socio-economic changes in a turbulent world, is especially difficult to envision as a film. Cinematically, it seems to be all over the map, yet the internal romanticism that glues it together is really, under scrutiny, not about much of anything at all. At once deceptively complex and curiously simplistic, it was a difficult book to get through, and the movie, written by the brilliant, Oscar-winning Ronald Harwood (The Pianist) and directed by England’s Mike Newell (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), is a long and daunting journey that I eventually found worth the effort, if not entirely effortless.

In Cartagena, when a respected old doctor dies, his widow is visited by another old man who confesses he has always loved her. She throws him out in horror for invading her privacy in a time of mourning. The film flashes back to 1879, when they were young, and their story begins. He is Florentino Ariza (Spain’s Javier Bardem), a poor boy who delivers telegrams. One day he sees the beautiful Fermina Daza (Italy’s Giovanna Mezzogiorno) in a window of her family’s regal home and falls passionately and irreversibly in love. She returns his advances, but her social-climbing father (multitalented Colombian-born New Yorker John Leguizamo) plans to turn his daughter into a grand lady with a wealthy husband, and the idea of her marrying a delivery boy beneath her station is out of the question. The lovers are separated, and Fermina is sent to the country where she is saved from a serious illness by the dashing Dr. Juvenal Urbino (San Francisco’s Benjamin Bratt), who marries her and gives her the life her father has always prayed for. Once she becomes a wife and mother with wealth and position, Fermina forgets all about her first love, but the lonely, eternally devoted Florentino, to the heartbreak of his mother (Brazil’s Fernanda Montenegro), waits more than half a century for Dr. Urbino to die so he can consummate their love at last. During the years he sleeps with many women (by 1900 he’s up to 374) but loves none of them. As I said before, the story drags on for 53 years, and it often feels like we are living through every one of them. Meanwhile, there is the lush spectacle of fireworks, cockfights, exotic brothels and riverboat paddle wheelers to enjoy, as Florentino rises from delivery boy to shipping clerk to owner of the entire riverboat line. Cholera is used as a metaphor for the kind of love and life that becomes the equivalent of a long and painful death.

The book was hailed as a masterpiece when it was published in 1985. I don’t think the film resonates with the same timeless sensuality. It’s literal, long and really quite taxing, and nobody in the age of instant gratification and easy divorce waits half a century for true love. Still, it is lovely to look at, the production details are impressive, the screenplay covers a lot of ground and the acting is fine, although Mr. Bardem has a much juicier time of it in No Country for Old Men. I like him a lot less as a wimpy, lovesick puppy and a lot more as a murderously rampaging Texas psycho.