Voices: 'Love in the Time of Cholera'...and Melodramatic Movies

In keeping with the theme of great books and great movies, I recently watched the 2007 film adaptation of Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, soon after completing the novel. Let's start with the novel: beautiful, enchanting, compelling. I loved reading about the intense love triangle between the beautiful middle-class Fermina Daza, the awkward, poor Florentino Ariza and the confident, rich Dr. Juvenal Urbino.

The version that I read, translated from Spanish by Edith Grossman, featured lush details and memorable scenes and characters as it weaved the tale of Daza and Ariza's young love, courtship and engagement that is hindered by Daza's father's quest for his only child to marry a wealthy and important man. Dr. Urbino, a European-educated Cholera expert, is perfect and begins to hunt Daza endlessly until she gives in to his proposal. The story then follows Daza and Urbino's peaceful, if not exactly passionate, 50+ year marriage and Ariza's 50+ year pursuit of the woman he loves.


The film, to its credit, is painstakingly true to the book. However, the two mediums are so different and even with Marquez's brilliant scenes and dialogue, the adaptation falls flat. The characters, so complex and three-dimensional in print, become caricatures of themselves on screen, with Lorenzo Daza, Fermina's brash and curiously wealthy father, becomes a foot-stomping, cigar-chomping joke on-screen, played by John Leguizamo. Fermina, so fierce and smart and thoughtful in the book, becomes something of an annoying damsel in the film.

To his credit, the Spanish actor Javier Bardem, does Florentino Ariza (who kind of annoyed me in the book) a lot of beautiful, romantic justice. But one great performance does not a good movie make. There is a reason why Mr. Marquez protested to having his books made into movies...he knew they'd suck.

The book is wonderful, 5 stars. The movie, not so much. The entire time I kept feeling as if I was watching a really long Mexican soap opera, complete with overly expressive glances and long, drawn out gestures. But read the book and watch the movie to draw your own conclusions!

--Whitney Teal