It's easy to fall in love with a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but certain obstacles stand in the way of loving his characters. As time goes by and one becomes increasingly mired in the concerns of the 21st century — "Should I buy an iPhone?" "How many minutes do I have left on this exercise machine?" — his characters seem freakishly unreal, unnecessarily passionate and terribly incorrect, politically. (The guy who kills his bride because she wasn't a virgin? The granny who peddles her granddaughter as a prostitute but still says she loves her? These people could never cut it in the real world.)
Anyone who has dipped into the pages of a Garcia Marquez novel will feel the heat rising from the pages like some exotic South American fever, luring us into a dream world where the air is fetid with lust and a deep, unquenchable desire for love. They will also discover that none of the people in his books will work for us in terms of family, friends, or even drinking buddies. It's little wonder that with the exception of "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" (1987) no Garcia Marquez novel has been adapted — relating to his characters is just too hard.
So, "Love in the Time of Cholera" comes as a surprise, not least because it was directed by Brit Mike Newell, better known for arid rom-coms like "Four Weddings and a Funeral" than a mightily caloric love story spanning 50-odd years. And though you want to applaud the director for his courage in taking on this grand-scale project, it could have fared better in different hands. "Love . . . " is a sprawling, sticky epic of a love relationship set in the cholera-ridden Colombia of the early 1900s. Balancing the metaphors of love and the deadly disease, it charts a one-sided romantic obsession that defies logic, common sense and several laws of physics. It's classic Garcia Marquez, where the main characters are outlandishly, ridiculously . . . Garcia Marquez. And the difficulty of drawing him shows, because Newell clearly has his hands full in dealing with his idiosyncrasies, and he falls short in transporting the rich, feverish eroticism of Marquez' prose. As it is, "Love . . . " feels chilly and stiff and faded in color, as if some voluptuous jungle flower had been forcibly transferred to a wintry, sunless England.