Mike Newell, Love in the Time of Cholera

by Kathryn Durfee
11/18/2007

In 2005, fans of the Harry Potter book series walked out of the theater feeling cheated by Mike Newell's film adaptation of the fourth book Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. This week, fans of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's classic novel Love in the Time of Cholera will exit the local multiplex with a similar feeling, again thanks to director Mike Newell.

It is nearing the end of the 19th century, and Florentino Ariza has fallen in love. While delivering a telegram to the house of Lorenzo Daza (John Leguizamo), Florentino (played as a teen by Unax Ugalde, by Javier Bardem as an adult) instantly falls for Daza's daughter Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorro). The innocent teens exchange love letters with the help of Fermina's aunt and servants, but when Lorenzo discovers what that his daughter is foolishly preparing to give herself to a boy so far below her worth and station, he whisks her away to the home of her cousin deep in the Colombian mountains. Florentino and Fermina continue to exchange letters, but by the time she is permitted to return home, she seems to have convinced herself that Florentino is indeed unworthy of her, and she breaks his heart by calling what they had an "illusion."

Florentino refuses to accept this as the end of their love. Fermina marries the wealthy Dr. Juvenal Urbino (long time, no see Benjamin Bratt), and while Florentino does not save his body for Fermina, he saves his heart for her, waiting for the day her husband dies. This turns out to be quite a long wait (over half a century), but in the meantime, he sleeps his way through the city in an attempt to forget about his pain. Though her marriage to Juvenal is not unhappy, Fermina constantly finds herself wondering what life would have been like with Florentino.

Adapted for the screen by Ronald Harwood, who wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-winning adaptation of The Pianist, Cholera seems to have lost much of its momentum in translation to the screen. I will admit that I have not read Marquez's original novel, but I can assume from its hefty size that many things have been left out. Clearly, lots of care was taken in developing the mise-en-scene for the film, but it is nearly impossible to sum up pages and pages of descriptive writing in single frames of a film. Yes, this is the danger of all book-to-screen adaptations, but for a writer known for such flowery and beautiful descriptions, perhaps even the medium of film fails to do his story justice.

The result is that Cholera is pretty but empty. It has all the markings of an Oscar hopeful, and seems to be more interested in wowing viewers with stunning visuals than winning them over with a good script. Newell's Cholera is predictable; instead of wondering what would happen to these estranged lovers next, I found myself thinking "and now's the scene where Fermina returns," and so on.

Playing with chronology in narrative structure should work to the storyteller's (in this case a film director's) advantage: viewers should think that the events that have come to pass could not have happened any other way, that fate rather than a director is in control. I can only assume that Marquez's writing allows for this; that his characters took on lives of their own and he merely followed. However, the result on screen is that viewers use the visuals of the final scene as a goal post. "Ah, the funeral," they will think, "we must be nearing the end."

Another danger in adapting a novel that spans so many years to the screen is the issue of aging actors. For Cholera, a younger actor is used to portray Florentino as a teen, but Giovanna Mezzogiorro plays 50 years of Fermina. By the end of the story, when the characters should perhaps have been played by older actors, the viewer is painfully aware of how much makeup has been caked on to Mezzogiorro's and Bardem's faces. Their movements and voices are unnatural for the ages they are supposed to be playing; they effectively become caricatures. Instead of seeing characters, we see only see the actors.

Misled by the title, I assumed this story would be a South American version of last year's The Painted Veil, in which cholera was a prominent feature. The disease plays a surprisingly small role here, but perhaps there could have been more. At the doctor's funeral, someone mentions how much he had done to help stop the spread of cholera. I often found myself wondering what it was that he had accomplished, wanting to see this side of the story rather than Florentino's loveless lovemaking.

Overall, this is a glossy but vacuous film. Since I have not seen much done in the way of marketing, my guess is that it will go by largely unnoticed. Lovers of the book will feel that Newell failed to convey the weight and beauty of the narrative using the camera. Likewise, those who have not read the book have been cheated out of Marquez's wonderful gift with language.