There’s nothing less magical—or less
realistic, for that
matter—than prosthetic sagging breasts. Mike Newell’s
English-
language adaptation of Gabriel García
Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera makes many,
perhaps unavoidable, errors in translation, but the worst has to be the
old-age makeup. The story of a schoolgirl being courted by a dogged
telegraph operator requires fresh white camellias and unlined faces;
the story of the aged suitor’s rush to his beloved’s side after the
eventual death of her husband requires—no, not just artificial
creases plastered onto thirtysomething abdomens. It demands old people:
new actors, with real skin.
Love in the Time of Cholera is an incredibly generous
novel, its sympathies unleashed more by the characters’ consciousnesses
than their frequently pathetic outward behavior. Strip away the
thoughts and you’re left with a love story so generic that Shakira
could
supply the soundtrack. (In fact, she did.) Fermina Daza (the
charmless Giovanna Mezzogiorno) is the daughter of a mule magnate with
dubious origins. Her working-class admirer Florentino Ariza (Javier
Bardem, groveling) doesn’t notice her suspect status; and the
distinguished Dr. Urbino (a slimy Benjamin Bratt) is so transfixed by
her powdery skin and cranky behavior that he
forgives it. In the
film, none of these characters is particularly sympathetic: The girl is
capricious, the underdog is tiresome, and the good doctor has no
soul.
From this impoverished narrative,
Newell also tweezes out the
kinds of details that made the novel so deliciously strange. The baby
in the birdcage is gone; there is no black doll from Martinique that
grows until it splits its shoes. Dr. Urbino’s parrot doesn’t speak a
single word. There’s nothing in this movie except obsessive devotion
and accidental death. I found it exceptionally dull. 
