Much of the great joy of reading an author like Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the fact you're reading him - that you're allowing yourself to become engrossed in his florid phrasing and vivid descriptions, that he's taking you to a fully realized place, and that you're succumbing, gladly.
When a writer's voice is as distinctive as the Colombian Nobel Prize winner's, it's difficult to replicate it on screen, even though director Mike Newell and screenwriter Ronald Harwood remain largely faithful to Love in the Time of Cholera in their wildly flawed adaptation of Garcia Marquez's sweeping 1985 novel about a decades-old romantic obsession.
Harwood won an Academy Award for his adaptation of The Pianist. Here, he maintains much of the original dialogue but the meaning and emotion behind it is often strangely lacking. So, when the elegant Dr. Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt) assures his virgin bride (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) on their honeymoon, "This is going to be a lesson in love," a line that might have seemed palatable on the page clangs on the ear instead.
Similarly, the lovesick Florentino Ariza, insufficiently fleshed out without the benefit of pages upon pages of back story, comes off as a crazed stalker, a guy who needs to get a life (as well as a sturdier stomach). This, despite the fact he's played by Javier Bardem, an actor who's shown time and again that he has a great capacity for subtlety.
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