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. The director of "Donnie Brasco" and "Four Weddings and a Funeral" doesn't paint with the camera; he doesn't seize on certain visual motifs, as he should, and turn them into the equivalent of a lover's devotion to fetishes.

When characters are required to grow old over the course of a decades-spanning story, as in Love in the Time of Cholera, it's still a hit-or-miss proposition whether the combination of makeup and performance skills will convince us that a character is 40 years older than the actor.

Sometimes less truly is more, and Love in the Time of Cholera is proof.

As one unfamiliar with the novel, I found it hard to tease out its meaning from this handsomely mounted, well-acted, aggressively elliptical adaptation.

"Love" would be intolerably boring were it not for the frequent injections of humor, thanks largely to Hector Elizondo as Florentino's uncle, and for Bardem's ultimately winning performance.

Shot on location in vibrant Cartagena, the film's strong suit is aesthetic. Cinematographer Alfonso Beato, designer Wolf Kroeger and costume designer Marit Allen evoke aged exotic locales, rugged rural settings and dimly lit period interiors. A closing, aerial image has a breathtaking, spiritual beauty.

This romantic drama by director Mike Newell preserves the odd playfulness of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's international best seller but sacrifices its eroticism and intricate nonlinear plotting.

Today, the 1985 novel is the No. 1-selling paperback in North America. Sadly, the movie is a bonfire where the novel was a blaze of fireworks.

Newell has done some fine work in all sorts of genres, from "Four Weddings and a Funeral" to "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," but in "Cholera" he seems to be chronicling a half-century of events, passions and desires as a tourist, not a native.

Newell's rendering of the iconic novel is dull and creatively off-kilter, lacking the surreal magic and robust passion of Márquez's signature magical realism style and never fully engaging the viewer.

If you've seen "Gone With the Wind," you've seen what Love in the Time of Cholera isn't.

Despite a magnificent performance by Javier Bardem, the film not only falls short of the novel's magic, but fails to generate much of its own.

Newell's film arrives loaded with problems. The most superficial, but undeniably distracting, involves the way characters age at different rates and under makeup of varying believability.

More mediocre than magical.