Adaptation of Marquez classic is an inert production

By STEPHEN WHITTY

Newhouse News Service

In one of the rare examples of a studio trying to bring a genuine piece of literature to the screen, Javier Bardem, Liev Schreiber, John Leguizamo and Giovanna Mezzogiorno now star in the Gabriel Garcia Marquez classic novel of patient obsession, "Love in the Time of Cholera."

Too bad that watching it feels like 100 years of solitude.

Stripped of its magical touches, political subtexts and lapidary prose, the novel is the story of a nearly life-long unrequited love. Florentino is a passionately romantic teenage telegram boy. Fermina is a tremulously high-strung heiress. He pledges his devotion; her father thunders his objections; she marries another.

And, for more than 50 years, Florentino waits for her.

He's not exactly twiddling his thumbs over that half-century, though. Clinically separating love from sex, he decides to distract himself by bedding as many women as he can (the number eventually limps into the 600s). He also, almost accidentally, ascends into a position of prominence and power.

But still he thinks of Fermina at night, and clutches his sheets, and weeps.

There are a few troubles with turning this into a movie, and the first is that, reduced to its purely dramatic elements, "Love in the Time of Cholera" is, essentially, the story of something not happening. And that's not an easy tale to tell, unless you have particularly wonderful performers.

Director Mike Newell doesn't.

There isn't an actor here who really connects. Benjamin Bratt - who plays the doctor Fermina marries - is merely pleasant. John Leguizamo, who plays her fierce father, overacts (and, despite his Colombian roots, can't always keep his own Queens accent at bay). Liev Schreiber is wasted in the walk-on part of Florentino's boss.

The leads in any romance, of course, are the crucial elements, but here they're crucially lacking. Bardem, so terrifying in "No Country for Old Men," looks lost, overplaying the innocence as a younger man, overdoing the creakiness as an old one. In another actor's hands, the scenes of an adult Florentino collapsing into his mother's arms, weeping about his lost love, would be heartbreaking. Here, you just want to shout at him to grow up.

And Giovanna Mezzogiorno, asked to play a woman over half a century of life, seems to have only two approaches - nervous as a girl, and haughty as a woman. Another actress would make you understand why she entered into a bad marriage (as Naomi Watts did, in "The Painted Veil") - Mezzogiorno's thoughts remain her own. Instead of being drawn into her heartbreak, we're kept at distance.

Newell gets plenty of mileage - literally and figuratively - out of his Colombian locations, taking us deep into the jungle and into corners of Cartagena the movies have very rarely shown. And, as Florentino's mother, the wonderful Brazilian actress Fernanda Montenegro gets several great tragi-comic scenes, as she tries to cure her only child's lovesickness by throwing lusty widows in his way.

But even she can't distract him. Or liven up this exceedingly slow adaptation that somehow manages to discard everything in the novel but the margins.

(TWO STARS. Rated R. The film contains nudity, sexual situations and violence.)