Tuesday, January 9, 2024

Other Doctor Lives: Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001, R)

*Note: For my shame, I always need to do a mental double take to remember that John Hurt is a former Doctor. In the context of Doctor Who, I include him in the list (as Eight point Five,) but in the context of John Hurt, I have a delayed reaction. I was about ten minutes into watching this film before I was like, “Oh yeah, this is Other Doctor Lives, isn’t it?”*

This is an old DVD that I bought back in my Christian Bale days, and now it’s part of a stack of attempted-decluttering movies that I’m rewatching to make sure the discs are in good condition before I sell or donate them. As a Christian Bale movie, it was never one of my favorites, in part because his role is so small and in part because the central romance just doesn’t really grab me. However, it is an Other Doctor Lives film, thanks to John Hurt.

During WWII, a small Greek island is occupied by an Italian garrison and several German officers. Pelagia, the daughter of the village doctor and a learned woman, is initially disdainful of the Italian captain who’s quartered in their home, but Antonio Corelli slowly starts to win her over.

Maybe Pelagia warms to Corelli, but I never do. On the surface, he might seem tailor-made to make an intelligent woman from a provincial village love him, with his cultured interests, passion for music, and overall love of life. But I don’t like that he basically treats the war like a holiday abroad and wants to foster a “big happy family” atmosphere with the very people whose village he’s occupying, some of whom have family members who are off fighting for the Allied Forces. He pals around with kids and arranges village dances, and he organizes his men, not by rank, but by their voice part in their opera society. When one of the German officers snaps off a, “Heil, Hitler,” he jokingly responds with, “Heil, Puccini.”

To me, it feels like the epitome of “dude, read the room.” As Pelagia says to him early in their acquaintance, “There are people I knew, people I grew up with, who are fighting for their lives and dying, and all you do is sing!” So it bugs me that the shtick ends up working on her, and it’s all but inevitable that she falls for Corelli. There’s also her fiancée Mandras, an unschooled fisherman who’s grown distrustful and angry since his time in the war.

So, since this is a romance film and I don’t like the main romance, this isn’t a winner for me, despite some good actors in the cast. Penélope Cruz plays Pelagia to Nicolas Cage’s Corelli, and they just feel like an odd pair. Maybe they would work better together with a better romance, but I don’t think they gain much momentum over the course of the film. Bale plays Mandras, whose job is basically to show up every now and then to demonstrate how much he’s not like Corelli. David Morrissey, who I still remember best from State of Play, plays Capt. Weber, one of the few German officers on the island.

Meanwhile, Hurt plays Pelgia’s father, Dr. Iannis. He’s an educated and respected man on the island, serious without taking himself too seriously. He’s a realist, he cares about what’s happening in the world, and he wants what’s best for his daughter (unfortunately, he’s also Team Corelli.)

He can be wry, like near the start of the film when Pelagia says, “Mandras wants to marry me. I told him he’d have to ask you”—not missing a beat, Iannis exclaims, “I don’t want to marry him!” And he can be stoically insightful, like when everyone has just listened to Capt. Weber waxing about German might and Aryan superiority—softly, he says, “Sometimes it would be better to lose than to have so much blood on your hands.”

Accent Watch

Greek, I suppose.

Recommend?

In General – I wouldn’t. It’s far from the worst movie I’ve watched because an actor I like is in it, but it just doesn’t work for me.

John Hurt – Naw. Hurt played similar characters dozens of times, many of them in better movies than this. Watch one of them instead.

Warnings

Violence, sexual content, language, drinking/smoking, and strong thematic elements.

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