If you take the rather slender love story out of the book and try to make a movie about it, you end up with something that really just won't stand up. Nicholas Cage is diabolical as Corelli. He can't even smile spontaneously, and the man is supposed to be a charm-ball. If you know anything about the Second World War, the Italian army was a ludicrous army. Nicholas Cage is deeply miscast and the whole thing is absurd.
Every shot is posed like a seaside postcard.
The whole point about this film is that it ruthlessly does away with any excess. It's a really lean film. In that respect I actually prefer it in certain ways to the novel itself. The point is, this is like a magic hour movie - it's shot in golden light, it's a romance, it's deliberately, ruthlessly light. I prefer the fact that the Greek partisans, who in the book are portrayed as some ridiculous sub-human kind of animal species, are done away with and given some form of dignity in this film.