Love in the Time of Cholera
(Mike Newell, 2007)
Being a two hour film covering 50 years of complex relationships, it amazes me I had any feeling for it at all, besides maybe breathless. The writers were ambitious to say the least.
The set up is as follows: One rich, old man dies. We see the wife as visibly heartbroken. Our sympathy is all about her. We love this man who's dead—one attendant of the wake says “your husband was a saint.” We want to know his life. He is our hero.
Hitch in film making that can't be helped: The actress playing the wife is obviously NOT 72, like her makeup and wig want us to believe. No amount of newfangled, wrinkle-making, skinish makeup is going to hide that Giovanna Mezzogiorno is a gorgeous 20 something. The job on Benjamin Bratt, our dead hero, is more convincing. Whether this is because he has facial hair or because Hollywood clings to making their women as glamorous as possible despite how old and wrinkly they are supposed to be, I don't know, I don't really care either, but it's interesting.
Anway, it is here, suddenly that a very different old man sits upright in a luscious red hammock out of the arms of a ridiculously gorgeous young woman (naked) to rush to the window. He tells her to go back to college, there is something he must do.
Next cut, this new old man (could he, Florentino Ariza, played by Jarvier Bardem, be our actual hero? This shifty man with curled mustachios?) asks for the distraught old lady's hand in marriage for he has loved her for “50 years, 9 months and 4 days”. She, in no uncertain terms, tells him to drop dead, and we have a plot worth caring about.
The expected flash back happens, and we've a couple archetypes to suddenly deal with. IE. Bored again... Upstart young poor boy (Florentino), gorgeous/shy young rich girl (Fermina), forbidding father... Romeo and Juliet set in Colombia.
The best thing that has happened has to do with the supporting cast. John Leguizamo and Lieve Schieber need to do more things. I love them. Here Leguizamo is the father, resplendent in mullet and power trips. He is genuinely scary. Schieber is the telegraph master who tries to get Florentino laid at a brothel. Because of their intervention our leads start to show some spunk.
Fermina threatens to kill herself with a knife, not by saying anything, but by actually starting to do so at the dinner table. Florentino politely refuses advances of whores, not so dramatic, but that's what his character is all about. Tiny moments, crucial to the rest of their development, return interest to the viewer. The whole thing is storyboarded into these tiny moments.
So, yes, it gets better from here, she chooses to marry some other guy—a dandy doctor—after telling Florentino she never really loved him, get over it. Florentino starts a diary of 622 women he fucks over the aforementioned 50 years.
My personal favorite moment is the meeting of doctor (played by Benjamin Bratt) and Fermina meet. She might have cholera (oh gods, this theme is so well tied into everything without being too much a character itself, very well handled) so, as he has no stethoscope, he rips open her shirt and listens to her chest, back, chest again. He is very matter of fact, but Mezzogiorno's acting conveys all the emotions a virgin in this situation would garble and not quite express. Mezzogiorno's acting is first rate throughout. Full range of expression, nuanced, consistent and has excellent chemistry with both Bratt and Bardem. Who should by no means be underestimated either.
In fact, all the acting in this film is ridiculously good. It's probably the best thing about the film. The characters, and their various quirks and motivations would be completely lost without these actors, and the movie would have failed. Similarly, gods bless directors and writers who stick to the good literature they rip off. Every shot, down to the 2 second helicopter shot over a caravan, is fully cast, propped , colored and agonized over to present the feeling of opulence that Marquez spends so many words creating.
So many words that, even with this attention to detail, the book is obviously too involved to fully express on screen. Some details, in the film, make little sense, or are left loose. The conflict between with Catholicism, for example. There are many heavy handed shots of catholic masses and funerals, and the lady the Doctor has the affair with is Protestant... either this is a symbol of his character which never gets developed or it's a cultural conflict which never gets developed. In either case its left alone because movies have some serious time constraints, but that's something you gotta take into account. The sumptuous shots of transubstantiation are gorgeous, but ultimately distracting from the plot.
And after all this, the ending is actually a bit weak. With goal achieved, Florentino gives his last words on the subject “After 53 years, seven months and 11 days and night, my heart was at last fulfilled. And I discovered, to my joy, that it is life and not death that has no limits.” But, we haven't heard his thoughts on this before... See? Adapting books to movies is so slippery that even when you perfectly capture the writer's tone, and manage to squeeze the epic to two hours, it just won't have the same round impact.
At least all those characters and years are sufficiently understood. And most of it is damned pretty.
(Mike Newell, 2007)
Being a two hour film covering 50 years of complex relationships, it amazes me I had any feeling for it at all, besides maybe breathless. The writers were ambitious to say the least.
The set up is as follows: One rich, old man dies. We see the wife as visibly heartbroken. Our sympathy is all about her. We love this man who's dead—one attendant of the wake says “your husband was a saint.” We want to know his life. He is our hero.
Hitch in film making that can't be helped: The actress playing the wife is obviously NOT 72, like her makeup and wig want us to believe. No amount of newfangled, wrinkle-making, skinish makeup is going to hide that Giovanna Mezzogiorno is a gorgeous 20 something. The job on Benjamin Bratt, our dead hero, is more convincing. Whether this is because he has facial hair or because Hollywood clings to making their women as glamorous as possible despite how old and wrinkly they are supposed to be, I don't know, I don't really care either, but it's interesting.
Anway, it is here, suddenly that a very different old man sits upright in a luscious red hammock out of the arms of a ridiculously gorgeous young woman (naked) to rush to the window. He tells her to go back to college, there is something he must do.
Next cut, this new old man (could he, Florentino Ariza, played by Jarvier Bardem, be our actual hero? This shifty man with curled mustachios?) asks for the distraught old lady's hand in marriage for he has loved her for “50 years, 9 months and 4 days”. She, in no uncertain terms, tells him to drop dead, and we have a plot worth caring about.
The expected flash back happens, and we've a couple archetypes to suddenly deal with. IE. Bored again... Upstart young poor boy (Florentino), gorgeous/shy young rich girl (Fermina), forbidding father... Romeo and Juliet set in Colombia.
The best thing that has happened has to do with the supporting cast. John Leguizamo and Lieve Schieber need to do more things. I love them. Here Leguizamo is the father, resplendent in mullet and power trips. He is genuinely scary. Schieber is the telegraph master who tries to get Florentino laid at a brothel. Because of their intervention our leads start to show some spunk.
Fermina threatens to kill herself with a knife, not by saying anything, but by actually starting to do so at the dinner table. Florentino politely refuses advances of whores, not so dramatic, but that's what his character is all about. Tiny moments, crucial to the rest of their development, return interest to the viewer. The whole thing is storyboarded into these tiny moments.
So, yes, it gets better from here, she chooses to marry some other guy—a dandy doctor—after telling Florentino she never really loved him, get over it. Florentino starts a diary of 622 women he fucks over the aforementioned 50 years.
My personal favorite moment is the meeting of doctor (played by Benjamin Bratt) and Fermina meet. She might have cholera (oh gods, this theme is so well tied into everything without being too much a character itself, very well handled) so, as he has no stethoscope, he rips open her shirt and listens to her chest, back, chest again. He is very matter of fact, but Mezzogiorno's acting conveys all the emotions a virgin in this situation would garble and not quite express. Mezzogiorno's acting is first rate throughout. Full range of expression, nuanced, consistent and has excellent chemistry with both Bratt and Bardem. Who should by no means be underestimated either.
In fact, all the acting in this film is ridiculously good. It's probably the best thing about the film. The characters, and their various quirks and motivations would be completely lost without these actors, and the movie would have failed. Similarly, gods bless directors and writers who stick to the good literature they rip off. Every shot, down to the 2 second helicopter shot over a caravan, is fully cast, propped , colored and agonized over to present the feeling of opulence that Marquez spends so many words creating.
So many words that, even with this attention to detail, the book is obviously too involved to fully express on screen. Some details, in the film, make little sense, or are left loose. The conflict between with Catholicism, for example. There are many heavy handed shots of catholic masses and funerals, and the lady the Doctor has the affair with is Protestant... either this is a symbol of his character which never gets developed or it's a cultural conflict which never gets developed. In either case its left alone because movies have some serious time constraints, but that's something you gotta take into account. The sumptuous shots of transubstantiation are gorgeous, but ultimately distracting from the plot.
And after all this, the ending is actually a bit weak. With goal achieved, Florentino gives his last words on the subject “After 53 years, seven months and 11 days and night, my heart was at last fulfilled. And I discovered, to my joy, that it is life and not death that has no limits.” But, we haven't heard his thoughts on this before... See? Adapting books to movies is so slippery that even when you perfectly capture the writer's tone, and manage to squeeze the epic to two hours, it just won't have the same round impact.
At least all those characters and years are sufficiently understood. And most of it is damned pretty.
