A flawed movie

Rating: Null/10 (5 May 2001)

The problem with producing a movie based on a book is that sometimes movie-makers try to turn the book into a movie.
The texture of the book is found in the detailed and poetic prose that describe the anecdotes of the quirky characters and explained parts of their lives and their motivations. For example, there is Father Antonio who gets alcohol poisoning because he is too greedy for the offerings his parishioners bring. There's Mandras, the idealistic and playful fisherman who finds his soulmates while swimming with dolphins. There's Carlo Guercio the gay Italian soldier who falls in love with another solider Francesco who inspires him to heroic acts that even his Greek enemies cheer. There's Dr Iannis who speaks with the longest words he can find for no other reason than he is Greek. The book is filled with these stories so much so that there's hardly any space left for the love story of Captain Correlli and Pelagia.
The movie attempts to cram as many of the stories into the first 40 minutes. The book managed to pace itself with luscious descriptions of the island, but movies with their finite time spans and budgets do not have that luxury. The result is that pacing was completely lost and felt hurried and cramped. I also felt that the actors seemed to feel the pacing and hurried in their speeches as well, especially Nicolas Cage. Certainly each scene by itself was a credit to the director, cinematographer and the actors in them, but the editor left hardly a pause for the audience to take a breath and inhale the atmosphere. I would have loved to see what the movie would have been like if it were three hours long instead of its paltry one hour and 50 minutes.
This is not to say that the moviemakers are completely to blame. The author himself bears a certain degree of responsibility. In his book, Louis de Benieres furnished each character with a chapter for themselves so that the wonderful tales of their lives and loves could be told. Yet conspicuously missing is the one for Captain Corelli. Captain Corelli in the book became more like a machine that was built for spouting one-liners and for buffoonery and only appeared toward the middle of it. I'm suggesting that the character of Captain Corelli was nowhere near developed enough to centre a movie around. I've always felt that the best love stories only fluorished in backdrops of drama and social and cultural tension. There was none of that during the occupation on the island of Cephalonnia thanks to the incessant camaraderie between the native Greeks and the Italian soldiers who occupied their island. Thus the love story had so little drama that it felt more like a teenage crush story with all its awkwardness and assumptions. I would stick my neck out to suggest that de Benieres wrote in the character of Captain Corelli and named the book after him as a cynical joke played on his publishers after they insisted that a book of the inhabitants of a tiny Greek island during its occupation in World War II would not sell as well as a romance novel.
Having said all that, I would recommend that you watch the movie and read the book. In that order. You can introduce yourself to the characters during the movie. But allow the book to flesh them out for you. Trust me on this.