Fifty ways to leave your ‘Love’

The shadowy question mark hanging in the air above the film version of Gabriel García Márquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera is whether a writing style so reliant on lexical texture could possibly work in a visual medium. If so, the film could be instructive to Salman Rushdie as he adapts his short story ‘The Firebird’s Nest’ for film. As mages of magical realism, the two authors are often mentioned in the same breath, much to Rushdie’s irritation. Márquez, whom I gave up on after One Hundred Years of Solitude, writes upmarket pulp. He churns out twists at the pace of dimestore novels with exhausting, page-long subplots which could support books in their own right.

The Cholera movie has drastically simplified that style and feels nothing like reading Márquez. It isn’t exactly good, but it is entertaining for diehard romantics. This Laila-Majnu story of lovers separated by a tyrannical father is straight Bollywood. The flick is at its essence a nipple menagerie — I lost count after ten pair. Javier Bardem is woefully miscast as a meek clerk, his jock chin the width of the Amazon. But since his tragic obsession is unfulfilled, the clerk turns into a legendary poon-hound. The film captures some truths, like this paraphrased dialogue:

‘Why are you so successful with women?’

‘Because they know I won’t harm them, they can see that I need love.’

It’s a fine summary of the mating strategy of bounders. The first half of the film is cheesy and laughable, but the latter half about old love between the aging Don Juan and the woman whom he obsessed over for half a century, matures into something like dignity. Bardem’s bedraggled gray scalp and his Galatea’s sagging rack set a high-water mark for aging prosthetics. Benjamin Bratt pulls a Rico Suave. John Leguizamo is as hammy as Amitabh here, his accent firmly situated at some intersection in Queens.

Bardem also plays the assassin in No Country for Old Men, an adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel. The difference in the movies’ source material couldn’t be starker. McCarthy pens taciturn, plot-driven potboilers which at first glance read a bit like Elmore Leonard. Some scenes in the book map cleanly and word-for-word to the movie. Márquez too is plot-centric, but takes many a florid detour along the way. None of that wonderful rhetorical texture comes through in this dialogue-light film, which is hamstrung by insisting that even its Italian female lead speak in a tawdry simulacrum of Colombian-accented English.

Márquez’ plots redefined literary sprawl. Modern editions of his novels diagram his family trees as maps for lost readers. Films pare away such epic plots, the constraints of the medium. But like The Namesake, this one doesn’t trim enough, lightly skimming over what it should inhabit. What we’re left with is not a film which evokes Márquez so much as a Lifetime drama loosely based on the plot of the book. It’s a separate work, and not in a good way.

Márquez anticipated the hackishness of Hollywood. He reputedly turned down over fifty earlier offers to adapt the novel. After seeing this effort, I’m more skeptical than ever that someone could film Midnight’s Children or The Ground Beneath Her Feet and have it feel anything like rococo, luscious Salman. Maybe it’s as well that Mike Newell didn’t try.