Movie Review - 'Love in the Time of Cholera'

Love in the Time of Cholera

Starring Javier Bardem, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, and Benjamin Bratt
Directed by Mike Newell
Rated R

Love in the Time of Cholera won the Pulitzer Prize back in the 1980s. The book was a sweeping ode to the insistence of unrequited love, that the less someone loves you in return, the more you'll love them either to change the other person's mind or to prove to yourself it hasn't been love in vain.

You could make the argument that  Florentino Ariza convinced himself of a love for Fermina Daza from the very beginning. After all, it was a passing glance that set 50 years of spurned love in motion. The argument I don't believe you could make, until Mike Newell's film version of the story, is that Love in the Time of Cholera is lighthearted and funny.

In the film, Ariza (Javier Bardem) responds to Fermina's wishes that he stay away from her by becoming a quiet Casanova, bedding over 600 partners in his life, all the while believing his heart is pure. Now, that character exists in the book as well, but there is a ribaldry here that doesn't fit. Granted, it's not as bad as the old age makeup used to convert Bardem, leading lady Giovanna Mezzogiorno and Benjamin Bratt from their actual ages to septuagenerians.

Bratt plays the doctor charged with saving Colombia from the ravages of the deadly cholera, and, while he's at it, he becomes the less-than-always-loving husband standing in Ariza's way, obscuring the path to Fermina's heart.

Bardem would be good here if not for the strange and questionable tone of the film, which exudes very little pain and a whole lot of pleasure for a man who spends fifty years waiting for the love of his life. Clearly, Bratt is no real match for him, but Mezzogiorno probably steals the movie, believable as a young girl who doesn't know what love is and an old woman who always thought she did.

But I don't know how this film will satisfy ardent fans of the book, who, presumably, would constitute a significant portion of the audience. If Newell was trying to take the story a different way, he succeeded. But he either went too far or didn't go far enough. As it stands, Love in the Time of Cholera is in a no man's land, a little like the heart of Fermina Daza.