Captain Corelli’s Mandolin ** (2001, Nicolas Cage, Penélope Cruz, John Hurt, Christian Bale) – Classic Movie Review 3085

Director John Madden’s 2001 movie version of the Louis de Bernières international bestseller was immensely popular and has some things to recommend it. But it is bland, trite, clichéd and miscast, with all the book’s personal manipulations left in and most of its serious historical elements taken out.

Nicolas Cage goes for a silly stereotype Italian accent as Captain Corelli, the wartime slacker adrift with his band of singer soldiers on the Greek island of Cephalonia during WWII in 1942. The Spanish actress Penélope Cruz doesn’t seem quite the right fit as the Greek young woman Pelagia who falls for Corelli even though she has a fiancé in the local patriot Mandras (Christian Bale). When fisherman Mandras leaves her to fight with the Greek army, Pelagia falls in love with the local Italian commander Corelli.

John Hurt enjoys himself as Cruz’s father Dr Iannis, looking the craggy, weather-beaten part, although his accent wanders from Vladivostok to Bradford.

The serious historical and political elements of the book seem to have got lost in the need to put the feel-good love story at the forefront in the screenplay by Shawn Slovo, though the film livens up enormously when the war scenes explode across the screen. It seems to trivialise the momentous and tragic events on display, and is hardly a proper epitaph to the thousands of Italians and Greeks killed by the Nazis on Cephalonia.

If the jolly, peace-loving Italians are caricatures, the stereotypical portrayal of the Germans as one-dimensional nasties by British actors David Morrissey and Patrick Malahide is another demerit of a generally unsubtle film that likes to paint in large brushstrokes. Thank goodness for Irene Papas, Aspasia Kralli, Michael Yannatos, Gerasimos Skiadaressis and Dimitris Kaberidis.

With lovely cinematography by John Toll, it looks pretty, filmed on location on Cephalonia, though at other times the obvious sets sometimes make you wonder why they didn’t just make it all on a Hollywood backlot.

Director Gabriele Salvatores’s similarly themed earlier 1991 Italian film Mediterraneo got this exactly right.

Madden is the director of Shakespeare in Love (1998) and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011).

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3085

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