* SOME SPOILERS*
To begin with, I like the movie very much and admires the book for its unquestionable brilliance although some of its chapters are just too harrowing to read.
by MDSR
. . . the book has more than enough material to make a great film . . .
From my point of view, the book has a
vast amount of materials that are simply impossible to accommodate in a 2 hour movie.
The book is simply loaded with too much emotional angst associated with the nightmares of an international war and a civil war in Greece, its general effects on the populace and in the individual lives of the characters in the story.
A love story between a man and a woman constrained by differences of culture is hard enough to show in a film. Let alone setting it a time of war. I don't think that cramming a few more details of another character will enhance the compactness of a film without detracting attention from the main leads, especially that of Captain Corelli, from whose name the title of the movie was taken from. The movie is Corelli's story, after all, and his love Pelagia and his rival Mandras in a setting of war and chaos.
In the book, there is Carlo's heroic story as a closeted gay soldier in love with another soldier Francisco, and afterwards with Corelli. His story is just that
extremely touching, just too sublime that it could very well overshadow those of the leads. That's why I prefer the movie as is.
There is also Mandras whose own transformation from the beautiful lean youth, illiterate, naïve partisan to that of a paunchy stocky would-be commissar, is - admittedly – another superb turn of characterization with his own haunting end-of-life scene in the book. His own metamorphosis from a youth trying to find his own niche, trying too hard to prove himself and being blinded by ambition enough to suffer just as much hardships like Carlo would just stretch the movie too much aside from likewise diverting audience attention from the leads. I like the movie's open-ended final scene of Mandras fate – rejected, forlornly walking in a street alone, fading in the blackness of the night.
. . . have taken the very basic elements and made alterations that make the film into another typical hollywood love story.
To make alterations is a movie's artistic prerogative and I'm glad the very basic elements were preserved in the film. Otherwise, the producers and director should have changed the title to something else.
I don't think Captain Corelli's Mandolin is a typical Hollywood movie. Just because it has a
quiet happy resolution doesn't automatically make it a Hollywood formulaic movie.
How Hollywoodish is it when Pelagia (Cruz) was made up naturally, walks naturally like the women of the island, doesn't look like some glamorous, having perfectly proportioned, perfectly symmetrical body and facial features of a Greek goddess? She looked very naturally like a typical village girl.
How Hollywoodish is it that you have here a woman who would choose and genuinely fall in love with Corelli (Cage) - a balding, mature, apologetic-looking man, but nonetheless has a sense of humor and genuinely kind to one who has a body to die for like Mandras (Christian Bale), well-stocked and muscled, nimble footed and with youthful pretentious bravura and who in reality is unsure of himself? You only have to look around you to see that in real life,
not all women fall for the likes of Mandras . That is fantasy, that is, more often than not, Hollywood's version.
How Hollywoodish is it that at the end, Pelagia and Corelli would finally meet again after a lapse of so many years after the war when there are already noticeable
strays of gray in their hair, when Pelagia looked sterner, unsmiling and aged from resignation that Corelli has forgotten her and Corelli looking older, weaker and sadder than ever than when he was in the island?
How Hollywoodish is the film that has only one brief, discrete and restrained love scene between Pelagia and Corelli and none of the typical vulgar, cheap money shots of today's films? When there are only one, or is it two? scenes of
only naked breasts of whores on the beach?
How Hollywoodish is the film that doesn't dwell in impressing the viewer on the superb arms and war technology of those crazy years? How Hollywoodish is it that there are
no excessive or overstretch scenes of explosions and no sappy tiring, cliche dialoques about the heroism, the valor, the wisdom of all those involved in that global catastrophe of a war?
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Truth has an inscrutable,inexorable way of seeking out and revealing Itself into the Light.
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