There are two types of writers. The first type consists of great
story-tellers who glue our eyes to their works. We just can't
put their books down because we need to know what happened to the
characters. The second type consists of those who exert mastery over
language. They use it playfully when they want to amuse; they use it
powerfully when they want to move or inspire; sometimes they just use
it because they love the way it resonates. Most of the truly great
writers come from type two, like Shakespeare, Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
and Nabokov, but most of the truly great cinematic book adaptations
come from type one - writers like Stephen King, Mario Puzo, Harper Lee,
Raymond Chandler, and Ken Kesey.
That is not to say that these are universal laws. There are great
writers who were primarily story-tellers, like Cervantes and Tolstoy;
and there are great movies made from language-rich source works, like
A Clockwork Orange. As a general guideline, however, the works of
great type two writers are difficult to adapt into worthwhile films.
It may be a sad fact of our existence, but it is nonetheless true that
one is more likely to create a great film from a Chuck Palahniuk novel
than from a William Faulkner masterpiece.
It's good for potential screenwriters and directors to consider the
following axiomatic. If a great writer is great primarily because of
the way he masters language, one may make two assumptions: (1) it is
nearly impossible to translate that particular type of greatness into
cinematic terms; (2) it is completely impossible to do so in another
language. A literal-minded translation of Hamlet in Polish is just a
crazy-ass story about some fruitcake from an obviously inbred
royal family who builds up a Rambo-sized body count based on his
conversations with a ghost.
Well, a Polish version of Hamlet makes no less sense than an
English-language movie based on a masterwork of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
The written version of Love
in the Time of Cholera is a great work because of the magical spell
Marquez weaves with language - another language - and the devices he
uses to create that enchantment, like diaries and love-letters which
are essentially his alternative forms of interior monologues.
The New York Times selected no less an author than Thomas Pynchon
to review the novel Love in the Time of Cholera, and he could scarcely
have been more enthusiastic about what he called a "shining and
heartbreaking novel":
"And - oh boy - does he write well. He writes with impassioned control,
out of a maniacal serenity: the Garcimarquesian voice we have come to
recognize from the other fiction has matured, found and developed new
resources, been brought to a level where it can at once be classical and
familiar, opalescent and pure, able to praise and curse, laugh and cry,
fabulate and sing and when called upon, take off and soar, as in this
description of a turn-of-the-century balloon trip:
''From the sky they could see, just as God saw them, the ruins of the
very old and heroic city of Cartagena de Indias, the most beautiful in the
world, abandoned by its inhabitants because of the sieges of the English
and the atrocities of the buccaneers. They saw the walls, still intact,
the brambles in the streets, the fortifications devoured by heartsease,
the marble palaces and the golden altars and the viceroys rotting with
plague inside their armor.
They flew over the lake dwellings of the Trojas in Cataca, painted in
lunatic colors, with pens holding iguanas raised for food and balsam
apples and crepe myrtle hanging in the lacustrian gardens. Excited by
everyone's shouting, hundreds of naked children plunged into the water,
jumping out of windows, jumping from the roofs of the houses and from the
canoes that they handled with astonishing skill, and diving like shad to
recover the bundles of clothing, the bottles of cough syrup, the
beneficent food that the beautiful lady with the feathered hat threw to
them from the basket of the balloon.'''
Those passages are eloquent even in translation. But the actual
events portrayed by the work are no different, more or less, than a
summary of a year of General Hospital. The portion of the plot which
has survived into the film is a simple one. An old man dies. Another
old man realizes that the death represents his last chance at the
widow, who happens to be his true love. He professes his love on the
day of her husband's funeral, and the widow finds that highly
inappropriate, so he is sent away with his memories ... (cue
flashbacks). After some two hours of flashbacks to show us the
origin and progression of the romantic triangle, the story returns to
the two old coots. Will they reconcile to swelling music, or will they
remain separated forever? I'll bet you can guess.
There's the film's problem in a nutshell. Without all the book's
eloquence, without that brilliant, evocative and often playful use of words,
what's left for a movie? Just the soap opera plot about a love-sick
Colombian in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
And the performances are not good at all. The actors - even the
ones who do not normally speak English with any sort of Spanish
intonation - speak with cartoon accents that would embarrass Bill
Dana and Senor Wences. The actor John Leguizamo was born in Colombia
and can speak Spanish when needed, but normally speaks English with no
accent other than a tinge of New Yawk. Here he speaks English with
some kind of wacky accent which barely sounds Spanish. He sounds more
like Long John Silver. As for Liev Schrieber, the man is a great
actor, but I expected him to sell me a Chrysler Cordoba with rich
Corinthian leather.
On the other hand, the clumsy convention of having the Spanish
language represented by English with comical accents is merely one small drop in
the vast ocean of bad acting on display in this film. Many of the
performers are grossly miscast. The normally commanding Javier Bardem gives
an awkward impersonation of a love-sick youth turned love-sick coot,
as he shambles with baby steps, his head lowered and his shoulders
turned inward in a performance more appropriate for a high school
play. He does, however, turn in a great impersonation of Groucho:
Bardem seems like a master of subtlety compared to poor John
Leguizamo. John can be excellent in both comedies and modern urban
dramas, but he's a fish out of water in this period piece. Turning in
a performance from the Snidely Whiplash school of acting, Leguizamo blusters, sneers and
snarls, twirls his moustache, raises his eyebrows separately, and
gesticulates wildly, failing to embody the perfect heartless conniver
only because of his inexplicable failure to send any bound damsels
into a sawmill.
And neither of them was the worst performer in the film. That would
be Angie Cepeda, who was so bad that I'm shocked her scenes were not
re-shot. You know your historical romance is in trouble when your best
period actor is
Benjamin Bratt.
If the performances weren't absurd enough to begin with, they are
raised to the level of Benny Hill silliness by the ineffective old-age make-up,
which the director keeps insisting on capturing in close-up after
unrealistic close-up.
I don't want to argue that the movie is awful, although some
aspects of it certainly are, but I feel I should prepare you for what
it really is: not a cinematic interpretation of a great work of art,
but simply a mushy soap opera photographed magnificently on location
in Cartagena in rich golden hues, backed by lush orchestral
arrangements and some soulful native folk songs. (Señor
García Márquez himself convinced the famous Colombian singer Shakira
to provide three songs for the film.) In addition to the heavenly
scenery and music, the women are universally divine, and they are frequently
topless in entertaining scenes, so the film is not without its charms.
I kind of enjoyed the film for what it was, and I would have enjoyed
it even more if it had run somewhat shorter than its existing 129
minutes, but it's a shame
that those few elements are the only worthwhile remnants which could
be salvaged from an acclaimed work by a
Nobel laureate.
