Filmgoers will suffer 'Cholera'

"Love In the Time of Cholera" turns out to be the dreaded Butt-Number in the Time of Oscar Season.

It's one of the those ambitious attempts to translate a great book that goes wrong almost from the get-go: You see the actors in their laughable old-age make-up, and you know you're one flashback away from at least four decades of high-tone soap opera.

The magical realism and Latin sensibility of Gabriel Garcia Marquez seem almost completely missing from this adaptation by Mike Newell ("Four Weddings and a Funeral"), who excises great chunks of narrative and much of the book's personality, as well.

"Love in the Time of Cholera" is the story of Florentino (Javier Bardem), a low-born Colombian whose passion for Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) outlasts her disapproving father (John Leguizamo) and her long (nearly endless) marriage to a patrician doctor (Benjamin Bratt).

Florentino endures 50 years of unrequited love by mounting (pardon the pun) a campaign of intense promiscuity, keeping a careful record of the several hundred women he beds. The general idea is that while loving a single woman would betray his grand longing for Fermina, several hundred meaningless encounters with semi-anonymous women do not.

Newell does not seem to know what to make of Florentino, whose Hefneresque rampage across 19th-century Colombia takes on the aura of addiction and/or dementia.

Florentino's quest has its comical aspect, but Newell's conception of Bardem is unintentionally funny - as he ages, Bardem bends to a permanent stoop, grows a black mustache and wears spectacles. He looks like Groucho Marx, and sounds like him, too: "Perhaps you'd be more comfortable if you loosened your bodice."

Grating against this wacky characterization is the stern performance of Mezzogiorno, whose inner feelings are presented as a series of hard stares. Her character's long, dreary marriage to the doctor barely makes emotional sense until she explains it all in the movie's final scenes.

Millions have fallen in love with Marquez's book, and you can forgive Newell for being one of them, and for wanting the artistic freedom to cross cultural boundaries to tackle a tough project.

"Cholera," though, has that stiff feeling of a transplant that didn't take - a labored Hollywood spectacle of studied accents and bad wigs, full of period detail but devoid of soul.

Lush music swells and ebbs (that's Shakira who's Bjorking out the lyrics), the camera sweeps over the Colombian landscape, the decades go by. You'll feel as though you lived through every minute of every one. *

Produced by Scott Steindorff, directed by Mike Newell, written by Ronald Harwood, music by Antonio Pinto and Shakira, distributed by New Line Cinema.