Let down badly by the words, enriched by the images

Rating: 8/10 (30 April 2002)

Alfred Hitchcock used to say that the sight of people in Paris (or Moscow, or Kefallonia) talking amongst themselves in English, was all by itself enough to ruin a movie. Okay, so Hitchcock was a bit loopy. But such things can happen. The way everyone in "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" speaks English - the Greeks with a Greek accent, the Italians with an Italian accent, the Germans with a German accent, the BBC newsman with a BBC accent - seriously undermines the credibility of every scene, and brings outright idiocies in its wake. It's fair enough, sometimes, to let English stand in for some other language. But EVERY other language? Details are obscured: is Captain Corelli bilingual, trilingual (he converses with Germans, but in what tongue? this is an important issue), or can he only speak Italian? How many languages can the average islander speak? How many languages can the average Italian private speak? Is there an accepted lingua franca on the island, and if so, what is it? It's as if everyone is speaking not Italian or Greek or German but European, a language with slightly different regional variants. Every single person we see speaks this English-as-a-second-language with precisely the same degree of proficiency - although Nicholas Cage will every so often utter a word like "signora" or "bella", to confuse matters further.
So the absence of subtitled Greek, Italian etc. is a real problem, accounting for all that is seriously wrong with the film - ALL that is seriously wrong, mind you, which is why I resent people talking about the film as though it were a disaster (those who have acquired an irrational hatred of Miramax are especially fond of doing so), when it is at worst a pleasant outing, with much to recommend it. Cinematography is gorgeous. The island is gorgeous. People look as though they really live there. (John Tool's photography is EXACTLY the kind of thing Peter Jackson ought to have tried for when he made "The Fellowship of the Ring". The fact that the latter was showered with praise and awards while the former merely got a few half-hearted compliments shows just how little respect Tolkeinesque fantasy is accorded. People EXPECT a World War Two story set on a Greek island to look superb. With fantasy, we're delighted if only it fails to look embarrassingly bad, sometimes even if it doesn't. But I digress.) There are one or two - okay, considerably more than one or two - lines that are just too obvious and pat, but usually contained within scenes that are somehow strong enough to bear them. The story as a whole is an engaging one. The bit with the sea mine is surely worthwhile.
No worse than mediocre in other respects, it's worth seeing simply because it's worth SEEING.