LA Times Says “Love In The Time Of Cholera” Blows, But Garcia-Marquez Totally Planned It That Way

Los Angeles Times movie critic Carina Chocano is a fan of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. So much so that even when the movie version of Love In The Time of Cholera is made into a P.O.S., she’s sure it was his plan all along:

That, after all these years of [Garcia Marquez] playing hard-to-get, the novel has made it to the screen in the form of a plodding, tone-deaf, overripe, overheated Oscar-baiting telenovela smacks of just the kind of deliciously ironic prank an 80-year-old Colombian Nobel laureate could really get behind.

Hmm. Okay. So what kind of funnies does the master treat us to?

The pan-Latin cast includes a mix of Latino Americans (Leguizamo, Hector Elizondo, Bratt), Latin Americans (Colombian Sandino Moreno and Brazilian Fernanda Montenegro), a Spaniard (Bardem) and an Italian (Mezzogiorno) all of whom are called upon to speak in Spanish-accented English. This has the unfortunate effect of catapulting García Márquez’s dry, deadpan humor into florid kitsch. You can’t be wry and aloof and sound like Ricardo Montalban at the same time.

Well, there was that one episode when Tattoo got to try out for the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. But really, with a stellar cast like that, surely there was some great acting. What about Javier Bardem?

The gifted Bardem is dopey as the lovesick Florentino Daza…

Bratt?

No such grasp of the character on the part of Bratt. Urbino is intended to be the opposite of the lovesick, socially obscure poet-dreamer. He’s a pragmatist, a scientist, a civic leader, something of a cold fish, but Bratt plays him like a suave, hand-kissing smoothie.

Leguizamo?

Leguizamo is painful to watch as Fermina’s social-climbing father — he can take the Colombian out of Queens but he can’t seem to take Queens, even in the late 1800s, out of the Colombian.

Ho! Ho! Ha…that Gabriel Garcia Marquez sure is a cut up.

‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ [LA Times]