Love in the Time of Cholera.

"Gabo's 1985 novel is a magical realist chronicle of a man who pledges his fidelity to one woman for a lifetime - in spirit if not in body," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "Now it is a film, directed by [Mike] Newell from a screenplay by the Oscar-winning Ronald Harwood that is as noble as Florentino Ariza's life-long infatuation with Fermina Daza, though something of a failure."

"The book, moving toward its triumphant conclusion, is a wonder," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "The long, magnificently adorned sentences - a stately river depositing alluvial riches of Colombian culture, décor, sexuality, humor, and manners into the reader's heart - are as intoxicating a literary experience as any available to us. Alas, the movie doesn't have that rich allusiveness or strong dose of foolish passion. It's a well-crafted, handsome period piece, and pleasant to watch, but the intensity of an obsessional style - something that matches Florentino's crazy single-mindedness - is beyond Newell's range."

Updated through 11/17.

"Easily the worst adaptation of a major novel by a Nobel Prize–winning author. Easily," emphasizes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice.

Earlier, Jürgen Fauth (only this time I'll snip a different quote): "It's fruitless to count the ways in which Love in the Time of Cholera fails. Critics' screenings here in New York are usually quiet affairs where you can get shushed for looking at the screen funny, but at the one I attended, people were talking back at the movie, Rocky Horror-style."

Update, 11/15: For Eric Kohn, writing in the New York Press, Love in the Time of Cholera's "an extravagant costume drama with a heavy bag of visual splendor, but nothing that really distinguishes it as an original work of art. Scenes play out as though the descriptive rhythms of Márquez's style were scrawled on the back of lavish animated postcards."

Updates, 11/16: "Faithful to the outline of the novel but emotionally and spiritually anemic, it slides into the void between art and entertainment, where well-intended would-be screen epics often land with a thud," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times.

"There's nothing in this movie except obsessive devotion and accidental death," writes Annie Wagner in the Stranger. "I found it exceptionally dull."

"Instead of an immersive, decades-spanning love story unfolding against a backdrop of political and social upheaval as the 19th century fades into the 20th, we get to see the stars stage selected scenes in period costumes, as if the cameras had caught an expensive game of dress-up," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club.

"That, after all these years of 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," suggests Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times.

Update, 11/17: "With Love in the Time of Cholera, Newell - whose last movie was the fine Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - has somehow come up with a picture that's both florid and stiff," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "Of all the supporting actors, Catalina Sandino Moreno, as Fermina's cousin Hildebranda, is the liveliest presence: You forget, momentarily, what a stinker you're watching while she's on-screen."

Posted by dwhudson at November 13, 2007 2:54 PM