Homage to Cephallonia.

Rating: 6/10 (22 May 2001)

(Spoilers throughout) Am I alone in thinking this film in many ways improves upon an excellent, if flawed, novel? Make no mistake: DeBernieres' book is a modern classic, but it has two major weaknesses  one aesthetic, another of historical accuracy. This film nobly addresses both of these.
1) Captain Corelli's Mandolin is an excellent and moving novel. The idyllic pre-war life of the natives is vividly and touchingly depicted. The subsequent horrors of war are thus all the more harrowing when they finally arrive.
For all that, DeBernieres singularly fails to create a satisfactory conclusion. The last hundred pages or so detailing the intricacies of Pelagia's post-war existence are not uninteresting in themselves but seem banal indeed compared to the stirring drama that has come before. It is essentially a Second World War novel and should have ended with Corelli's departure from the island, or at least, soon after. The concluding chapters add nothing to the novel  DeBernieres should have been more ruthless and ended the story as soon as the main action stopped. The Great Escape would not have been improved by a concluding section about the surviving character's lives in the post-war decades and nor is this.
Commendably, the film improves upon this weakness. Now Corelli returns, soon after the war's end. This is a decided improvement on the novel where an ageing Corelli does not return  inexplicably  until fifty years later! It is thus far too late for him and Pelagia to get together and provides a wholly unsatisfactory outcome to the novel.
2) The novel is also undermined by a serious historical misrepresentation of the Greek anti-Nazi resistance movement, notably the organisation ELAS who Mandras falls in with. In the book, these are portrayed as Stalinist demagogues, more interested in the propagation of a narrow interpretation of Marxist dogma and political infighting with the British Allies, than genuinely resisting the Nazis. After the war, they are portrayed as practically being akin to the Nazi terror they supplant:
in Cephallonia the Communists began to deport awkward characters to concentration campsHitler would have been proud of such assiduous pupils.' (p442).
As DeBernieres now grudgingly admits, in this respect, he got his research badly wrong. Although I am no expert on wartime Greece, by all accounts, ELAS played an active and constructive role in combating the Nazis. The film rectifies DeBernieres' error, showing Mandras and the other guerrillas fighting the Nazis side by side with the Italians. This does involve a fairly major alteration in the novel's story line, however  Mandras's attempt at rape and subsequent death thus do not occur here, nor do any of his guerrilla experiences which are detailed throughout the middle stages of the book.
There were other changes in the film that I was less keen on, however. The role of the Italian soldier Carlo, who plays a fairly major part in the novel, is here almost wholly omitted, presumably because of fears that his homosexuality would offend the crucial American market. His gesture in saving Corelli from the firing squad is thus largely inexplicable, except as  rather lamely  a benevolent sacrifice towards Pelagia.
On the other hand, CCM is such a long and complex novel that one can forgive the film makers for not transcribing every aspect of the book to the screen. Film is a different medium to literature. The unfairly hostile critical reception this film has received suggests far too many expected a carbon copy of the novel to be revealed on film. (And as Madden also directed the generally awful but highly overrated Shakespeare in Love perhaps this evens the score somewhat).
That said, the film is not perfect. I am not convinced Cage was the ideal Captain Corelli. The depiction of village life does come across fairly whimsically and compares poorly to the portrayal of European rural life in the 1940s in Jean De Florette. Although I've said changes from the book are not bad per se, some of the changes  the date of the earthquake from 1953 to 1947 seemed rather pointless. But generally ignore the pedants. The film would not be improved either by a) forcing the cast to learn and speak their character's native languages and subtitling throughout or b) correcting such 'inaccuracies' as the Italians occupying the island for two years (er - they did) or b) depicting Abyssinian style atrocities committed by the Italian forces on the island (none recorded). While not quite in the class of other Second World War classics like Empire of the Sun, Schindler's List or The Bridge on the River Kwai, this is generally a good film.