"Captain Corelli's Mandolin"

It's your classic fascist meets girl, fascist loses girl, fascist gets girl back again story.

By Charles Taylor

Aug. 17, 2001 | When did fascists become acceptable romantic heroes? The first instance was "The English Patient," where we were meant to go all swoony at the romantic nobility of Ralph Fiennes' saving Kristin Scott-Thomas's life and overlook the fact that he acts as a Nazi collaborator to do it. Now, in "Captain Corelli's Mandolin," we have Nicolas Cage as an Italian army officer in 1940 occupied Greece who's not really a fascist soldier, just a nice Italian boy. Boy, oh boy!

Like "The English Patient," "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" is based on a much-lauded novel that I found well nigh unreadable. In the case of the former it was because of Michael Ondaatje's opaque psuedo-poetic prose; in the case of Louis de Bernieres' novel, it was because of the precious folk fableness of it all. True to its source, Shawn Slovo's screenplay is full of colorful peasants and their colorful traditions, artfully distressed buildings and dusty sun-baked roads, incidents served up like a soggy overcooked stew, as if they'd been boiling away in some codger's memory for years, trotted out for village gatherings and holidays. ("Papa, tell us about when the Italians came!") As middlebrow prestige pictures go, "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" is decently enough made. John Toll's cinematography is most beautiful whenever the camera gets near water. Toll gives the Mediterranean such blue-green clarity that when a couple goes into the cool water with their clothes on you can imagine moviegoers across America, sweltering through another August, wanting to jump in with them.

But the movie's craft is dead and dutiful. It's an Oscar machine. There's no trace of the playfulness or willingness to please that the director, John Madden, brought to his last movie "Shakespeare in Love." That film felt like a holiday for the players; the actors here feel weighed down by their knowledge of the project's worthiness. Though Madden has cast the central role perfectly. The heroine is played by Penelope Cruz, charming in "All About My Mother" but ever since descended into the prestige-movie equivalent of shtick. She's lovely, all right, but consciously lovely. There's no fire or sensuality or surprise in her. And the scale of the emotions she projects is so tiny it doesn't disrupt the plummy production values.

Cruz plays Pelegia, the daughter of her Greek island's doctor (John Hurt, hiding behind a ludicrous moustache and giving in to every cliché of the wise, crusty old man bit). She is in love with Mandras (Christian Bale), a fisherman whom her father considers beneath her. But when the Italians invade Albania, the pair make a pact to marry after the war and Mandras goes off to fight. By the time he comes home, the Greeks have defeated the Italians and an enraged Hitler has divided up control of Greece with Mussolini. Mandras returns to find the Italians have taken over the island and one of their number, a Captain Antonio Corelli (Nicolas Cage), has been billeted with Pelegia and her father. The story the movie tells is how Pelegia, going against her promise and her instincts, falls in love with the Italian.

If "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" had just been the story of how love makes nonsense of our rationality and our loyalties, it might have been potent melodrama. Wartime may be good for sex (the possibility that you might die at any time has a freeing effect), but it's rarely good for romance. And the movie does show how brutally partisans treated women who became even mildly involved with the invaders. (In Marcel Ophuls' epic documentary "The Sorrow and the Pity," we see newsreel footage of French women who had slept with Germans having their heads shaved and paraded in public -- especially grotesque in a country that collaborated so widely.)

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