Review: Love in the Time of Cholera (2/5)

Love in the Time of Cholera
(Mike Newell):
Javier Bardem, Giovanna Mezzogiorno,
Benjamin Bratt, John Leguizamo.
Running time: 139 minutes.

For some movie stars, we will pay just to watch their face. The films come and go, but their possession – a cheeky smile perhaps, or sardonic eyes – remains the same. We find comfort in their consistency. Then there are movie stars who we will pay to watch disappear before our eyes.
Javier Bardem – Spanish, robust, Oscared – is one of the few male stars who has mastered invisibility. Bardem is looming with a face carved in sandstone – a crag for a chin, a swollen outcrop for a nose. But Bardem has a rare spirituality, an almost spectral presence. When he slides his bulk into a role, he can tailor it to suit any shape or size. To think of his films is to think of a chameleon: macho, virile in Jamón Jamón; passionate and effete in Before Night Falls; noble and desexed in The Sea Inside; deranged and captivating in No Country For Old Men.
In his latest film, Love in the Time of Cholera, Bardem is lopsided and miscast. You don’t see it coming. Not only is he visible, but he is clumsy. You feel however this is not entirely his fault.
The problems are wide and start at the beginning. There is the treatment, Hollywood style, of a Gabriel Garcia Márquez novel. Márquez conjures soulful, Latin heat and vibrant colour spiked with magical realism. Screenwriter Ronald Harwood boils most of that out to square it on screen. And it is directed by Mike Newell who is from England. This is the man who almost threw the game away with the line in the final minutes of that great English victory, Four Weddings and a Funeral, when Andy McDowell, looking like she had just got out of a bath with all her clothes on, told Hugh Grant she didn’t notice it was raining. And Newell is at it again, allowing all manner of sloppiness: there’s bad make-up and bad dialogue. (“Shoot me. There is no greater glory than to die for love,” a line for which somebody should be shot.) There are ill-measured performances (John Leguizamo, in full ham mode, is allowed to freerange when he should be hogtided). And then there’s the whole issue of bad romance: Cholera has been turned into a bodice ripper, more Barbara Cartland than Gabriel Garcia Márquez.
We first meet Bardem’s Florentino in the 1930s. He’s a hobbled old man, but sprightly enough for the beautiful young student who lies beside him in a hammock. And then he does something unthinkable: he kicks her out to go and propose marriage to the septuagenarian Fermina (Brazilian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno). Florentino has loved her unrequitedly for 50 years and finally sees his chance: her husband, Dr Juvenal (Benjamin Bratt) has died. But Juvenal is still warm in the coffin when he makes his proposal and Florentino is not impressed. (Perhaps if she’d seen what he was giving up, she might have been swayed.) Florentino is unperturbed, and continues to woo her. We then jump back to the 1890s, when he is a young man in the fever of first love, showering her with poetic letters. At first, Fermina looks like somebody who is being stalked. And frankly she is. Only then she is swayed by the power of his words. “I swear to you my eternal fidelity,” he tells her. But they are separated and she marries the doctor instead.
To get over Fermina, Florentino does what any self-respecting, jilted male would do: he becomes a complete cad. Six hundred women later, he is still pledging eternal love to Fermina. We are supposed to believe his prowess comes from his poetry, but Bardem wears a physique like a damaged flower – an impossible Don Juan. And for all the love, there’s no sensuality, no smell, no flavour to this film. It is shot in Cartagena, but might as well have been made on the backlot. There is an expensive moment when the camera cranes up over the Colombian rainforest and the shot takes all of three seconds before it is cut. You look towards Bardem, hoping he can anchor the film, but the editor, always in a rush, keeps cutting away from his face.
Márquez’s big theme in Cholera was love. It was a sickness. He approached it with the languor of a Latin lover, teasing out its manifestations: carnal, unrequited, matrimonial, eternal. To read Márquez is to revel in the foreplay of writing; with Newell, you begin to detect the sound of the director panting in your ear. He makes some awkward fumbles in the dark, hoping some of them will please, but his mind is fixed only on the endgame. It makes you want to roll over and go to sleep.