Movie Review Love in the Time of Cholera

Love in the Time of Cholera (2007) 

Directed by Mike Newell 

Written by Ronald Harwood 

Starring Javier Bardem, John Leguizamo, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Benjamin Bratt, Giovanna Mezzogiomo

Release Date November 16th, 2007

Published November 16th, 2007

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's beloved novel Love In The Time Of Cholera has been a cultural touchstone for the faux intellectual since its publication in 1985. Since then anyone trying to prove their intellect might drop in a reference to Love In The Time of Cholera. Filmmakers have long coveted the book as an adaptation prize but most who have endeavored to adapt it had deemed it unfilmable.

Director Mike Newell is the first director unwilling to accept that the book was unfilmable. Despite the talking birds, fifty year span of time, and Marquez's unique dialogue, Newell felt he could make it work as a film. He was wrong. Newell's Love In the Time of Cholera is a mess as a film. Goofy, halting, unintentionally humorous, Love In The Time of Cholera has eluded yet another director, unfortunately this one actually filmed his failed attempt.

Set in Cartagena Colombia near the turn of the 20th century, Love In The Time of Cholera stars Javier Bardem as Florentino Ariza. A telegraph operator, Florentino is not the most desirable husband for a young socialite whose father has ambitions beyond his station. What Florentino does have on his side is the soul of a poet. So, when he falls for the young socialite Fermina (Giovanna Mezzagiorno) he wins her heart with his words, despite the protestations of her father (John Leguizamo).

Carrying on their affair in letters, Florentino and Fermina manage to fall in love even after she is spirited away to her cousin's (Catalina Sandino Moreno) home in the country. Then things get odd. Upon her return to Cartegena, Fermina rejects Florentino. No reason is given, she just decides she is no longer in love with him. Crushed, Florentino vows to love her forever and remain a virgin until she changes her mind and comes back to him.

In the meantime Fermina meets and is seduced by a successful doctor, Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt), who almost singlehandedly turned the tide on the Columbia's cholera epidemic. Handsome and successful, Urbino is exactly the husband that Fermina's father wants for his daughter. And once again, Florentino is crushed.  His vow to remain chaste is soon foiled while on a boat trip and his discovery of sex leads him to chronicle all of his conquests while he waits for the one woman who can fulfill him.

The script by Oscar winner Ronald Harwood (The Pianist) removes most of the magical elements of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's book. There is no talking bird for one. But, also gone is much of the magic of Marquez's words. His unique patois, the lyrical digressions into scenery description. Many of the things that made people, Mike Newell included, want to adapt Love In The Time Of Cholera into a movie are gone from the movie.

What remains is part weepy chick flick and part goofball male fantasy. Florentino pledges eternal love to Fermina and waits for more than 50 years for his chance to be with her. That kind of romantic devotion certainly won over a few fans. Of course that fifty year wait in the book was built on the foundation of Marquez's unique writing style.

Minus Marquez, Love In The Time of Cholera the movie offers a weepy, whiny hero who actually pales in comparison to the man who actually gets the girl. Watching the film I couldn't help but wonder why any woman would, for a moment ,want Javier Bardem's creepy Florentino over Benjamin Bratt's handsome, successful Dr. Urbino. Indeed, Fermina must have wondered the same as she chose Urbina and stayed with him for 50 years.

Yet we are to believe somehow that Florentino is the hero of this story? All apologies to lovers of the book, but as rendered in the film Love In The Time of Cholera, Florentino is a loser. He's a complete tool. As written by Ronald Harwood, directed by Mike Newell, and played by the very talented Oscar nominee Javier Bardem, Florentino is a drip and a dope and a character who makes even the brilliant and handsome Javier Bardem look like a tool. 

Love In The Time of Cholera is a literary classic for its magical realism and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's fanciful ideas and dialogue. Mike Newell's take on the material is straight and melodramatic and goofy as all get out. Material that Marquez treats with a light satirical passion are given deathly serious takes on film. Poor Javier Bardem is left to carry heavily pained, dramatic moments that audiences are more likely to chuckle at than sympathize with.

Dull, weepy and way too serious about one goofball character, Love In the Time of Cholera is the kind of daft disaster that only a big Hollywood ego can turn out. Well done Mike Newell, well done.

Movie Review The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) 

Directed by Julian Schnabel

Written by Ronald Harwood

Starring Matthieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Anne Cosigny 

Release Date November 30th, 2007

Published December 25th, 2007 

Jean Dominique Bauby was a remarkable man even before the extraordinary end of his life. A globetrotting journalist who climbed the highest peaks, leapt out planes and lived the life most people dream of, the editor of the French edition of Elle Magazine could never be accused of taking life for granted.

That was the cruel irony of his fateful end. Bauby suffered a stroke at age 42 that left him paralyzed and suffering from what is called locked in syndrome. His mind was clear and vibrant but he was unable to move or communicate. The story of how Bauby in this condition still managed to author a bestselling book is captured in remarkably vivid fashion in Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Matthew Amalric stars as Jean Dominique Bauby and it is a remarkable transformation. The handsome French actor, glimpsed only briefly, in flashback, as he really looks, transforms completely into the role of a man trapped inside his own body. In the coma however, we catch only a few moments of Amalric as Bauby.

What director Julian Schnabel does so remarkably is use his camera to show us what Bauby's perspective was on his condition, literally and figuratively. Working from the text of Bauby's own bestseller, Schnabel and Oscar winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski show us everything from Bauby's bed ridden and wheelchair bound perspective.

The script by Oscar winner Ronald Harwood (The Pianist) infers from Bauby's book what Bauby's inner monologue was like in all its desperate, often sad, determined and darkly humorous musing. Thus we are inside Bauby's mind and watching through his eyes and we are riveted by his inner strength and struggle.

With the help of his speech therapist (Marie Josee Croze) and the support of his ex-wife (Emmanuelle Seigner) Bauby made use of the only working parts of his body, his left eye and his brain and developed a way to communicate. Making use of an assistant he managed to use a series of blinks to write a book about his struggle and the film of his inner struggle is stunning and compelling.

While you may think that the first person perspective is limiting, Schnabel and Kaminski make use of fantasy and other cinematic tricks of the trade to give us different perspectives and some of the most remarkable cinematography of the last year.

French with French subtitles, if you aren't a fan of foreign films you won't like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. If you are open minded however, you will get to experience an extraordinary true story crafted by a master director. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a remarkable piece of filmmaking.

Movie Review: The Pianist

The Pianist (2002) 

Directed by Roman Polanski 

Written by Ronald Harwood 

Starring Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Frank Finlay, Emilia Fox 

Release Date September 25th, 2002

Published September 24th, 2002

I have not enjoyed much of Roman Polanski's work. I found Rosemary's Baby to be somewhat tedious and his "comedy" Bitter Moon--with a naked Peter Coyote--is far more horrifying than anything in Rosemary's Baby. I put my preconceptions about Polanski aside as I sat down to watch his Oscar-nominated work The Pianist and found it to be a profound experience.

Adrien Brody, excellent in Spike Lee's highly underrated Summer Of Sam, is Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jewish pianist who makes money playing Chopin on Warsaw radio. That is, until one day as he is playing, bombs begin to fall and the beginning of World War II overtakes Szpilman's life and that of his family, mother, father, brother, and two sisters. We do not learn much about Szpilman's family except that they are rather typical, loving, bickering, and loyal. As the Nazis overtake Poland, the family is forced from their middle class home and crowded into the small Warsaw ghetto.

The scenes in the ghetto near the beginning of the war are a shocking and brutal sight of people starving and dying in the streets and Jews turning against Jews. Even as some Jews die in the streets, Wladyslaw finds work playing piano for an affluent group of Jews who were able to hold onto enough of their wealth to eat in a cafe with little concern for their brethren who starve in the streets.

Of course, even the affluent would soon learn that no money can save you from blind hatred and, in a short time, all of Warsaw's Jews are loaded on trains and shipped off to the death camps. Wladyslaw escapes the fate of some six million Jews who died in the gas chambers, when a Jewish police officer pulls him off the train and sends him to hide in the ghetto. With help from the Polish resistance Szpilman, spends a good deal of the war hiding in silence behind locked doors. In a poignant and moving scene, Szpilman is hidden in a flat with a piano he cannot play but he mimics playing above the keys and hears the music in his mind.

Most of the film is simply Szpilman, moving from hiding place to hiding place while witnessing history happening around him. He witnesses the Warsaw ghetto uprising, where a group of Jews who were saved from the gas chamber so that they could be employed as laborers, stole guns and fought the Germans for three days before being out-manned and outgunned.

Near the end we do see Szpilman, play the piano again and it is a heartbreaking moment as he seems to have forgotten how to play but quickly picks it up again, and by the end has brought the piece a whole new meaning simply with the courage it took for him to play it. (I'm not familiar with piano music well enough to know what the piece was called but it was very beautiful.) Adrien Brody is truly outstanding in The Pianist.

The Pianist is a very good film. The film is very depressing at times and I mean life-force-sucking, what-point-is-there-to-life-when-there-is-such-cruelty-in-the-world depressing. The subject matter certainly indicates that. Nevertheless, this is a very well made drama about a man who wasn't heroic or necessarily brave. Most of the time he was just lucky. It is rather unique to see a story told from the perspective of a character who isn't an active participant but rather is merely a witness.