Busted strings

Rating: 1/10 (19 July 2003)

SPOILERS AHEAD: Others here have wondered how this rates an IMDb 6/10. They're not alone, though my math runs slightly different: 8/10 for the first 30 minutes, zilch for the rest. Because it's as if there are two movies here: a lyrical small-budget essay about the impact of reluctant victors on reluctant losers. And a war movie so addled of execution you not only wonder where the hell the mandolin went, but where the plot disappeared to as well. It's as if director John Madden suddenly grows tired of the picturesque and picaresque and goes home, leaving everyone to stumble around in a morass of exploding cliches. Exposition? There ain't any. Bad enough that Cruz's capitulation to Cage is so unreal; worse, though, that the Italians sign up without demur or debate to the partisan side and battle it out with their former German allies for. . . What? No idea: if the island's some kind of strategic outpost, the script certainly seems unaware of it. Lazy film making doesn't get any lazier than this. What's especially sad about all this is that the original novel was based on fact, and wrought with such a delicate hand that it deservedly met with world-wide praise. Here, however, history is tarnished rather than garnished, and truth made to look like just another celluloid improbability. The nadir comes with the post-war 'earthquake', when you think 'aw for God's sake, do we REALLY need this rubbish on top of everything else?' Only later do you realise that the earthquake did happen, and that it's the movie's narrative incompetence that makes fact look like fiction. Of the cast, only Cruz and Hurt are worth mentioning: Cruz, because she is a consistent, consummate actress, and Hurt because he gives the impression that there's still some dramatic meat left on the plate even when the script ultimately deprives him of anything to gnaw on. As a result, Hurt's concluding monologue -- which wraps up the entire movie -- at least sounds slightly less trite than as written, so that you're not completely flattened by the stupefying banality it all. Even so, the performances of Cruz and Hurt still fail to mask the central problem that, at the end of the day, 'Captain Correlli's Mandolin' isn't actually about Corelli, or his mandolin, or indeed. . . anything at all. Hopeless. 2/10.