Captain Corelli's Mandolin (15)
Directed by John Madden

Showing at the Phoenix Picture House from Friday 4th May

The romantic war film is an attack on Death, a full-out assault on the ugliest aspects of humanity which can wreak meaningless and cruel death, a determination to believe in the supremacy of the lovers' passion over the evil actuality of war. In Captain Corelli's Mandolin, this assault is rendered somewhat irrelevant, for all the film's talk of "curing the wounds of the heart"; for the actuality of war is scarcely present in John Madden's new film, obscured as it is by a dense cloud of cliché. And if this adaptation of Louis de Bernierès' novel was intended to put the emphasis on the romantic aspect of the plot, it fails here too: even the most tender-hearted of romantics would find it hard to believe in the feelings of two such unlikely lovers as Nicolas Cage (Corelli) and Penelope Cruz (Pelagia).

A more egregious lack of chemistry has rarely graced the silver screen, and it is with pain that the viewer watches the exquisitely graceful, gazelle-like Cruz submit to Cage's wooden embrace. Cage's strong performance in Leaving Las Vegas proved that he is an actor of some talent; but here, his stoop-shouldered stance and rather empty scowl only add to the discomfort caused by his hopelessly mangled accent. The character of Corelli demands a complete charisma that electrifies every speech and movement, together with that uniquely Italian blend of buffoonery and poignancy. One yearns for a "real" Italian in the role - Roberto Benigni would have been perfect, with his expressive features and extraordinary energy. Cage's casting seems perverse, and his lacklustre, almost desultory performance gives one the impression that he feels this himself. Christian Bale's Greek accent is equally appalling; mercifully, the re-writing of the character of Mandras gives him precious little to say.

The film's dialogue is even more clumsy and irritating than the book's didactic prose could have predicted, and Corelli is thankfully rather less loquacious in the film than in the book. The scoring is somewhat excessive, with the mandolin repeating its incessant theme during nearly every scene, no doubt in the attempt to drum up the emotion that the lack of chemistry and dire dialogue fail to provoke-Warbeck is a fine composer of film scores, witness Shakespeare in Love, but he has no Tom Stoppard as collaborator this time.
Still, this movie is a feast for the eyes, if not the ears. Penelope Cruz carries the movie almost solely on the basis of her great, limpid eyes, through which a hundred subtle emotions seem to shudder. Her silence is more communicative than all of Corelli's struggling speeches and the camera loves her as it does the landscape. The island is the second great actor in the film; all those sun-drenched shots of white beaches and "colourful" villagers will do wonders for the Cephalonian tourist industry.

The rather dubious political subtexts of the book have been airbrushed away in the course of adaptation for the screen, and the romance ratcheted a notch higher, with the triangle between Bale, Cruz and Cage given primary emphasis. The Italians, dark-skinned, Verdi-singing, are the good guys; the pale-skinned, nasty Nazis are completely, and unambiguously, the bad guys. For all its promise of border-eroding love, this film does not even begin to tackle the questions of national and personal identity, of betrayal and fidelity, raised so provocatively in other recent war films such as The English Patient.

But while Captain Corelli's Mandolin demonstrates neither the semiotic productivity nor the political and emotional complexity of The English Patient, it seems unfair to criticize a mainstream movie for using sentiment rather than subtlety as its main tool (bludgeon). Captain Corelli's main flaw is that its central love affair is not only unbelievable, but uninteresting too. And who wants to see banal love, especially when the spectre of death, however effaced, is looming on the horizon?

Sharae Deckard, 30 / 4 / 01