There is a strange irony that occurs when one becomes a famous actor. Acting is necessarily an art form that requires one to portray or ‘become’ someone else. Actors speak of losing one’s self in a role. The whole point is to make themselves believable in order to suspend the audiences disbelief and tell a story. But if you are a mega famous actor how can you possibly hope to attain the anonymity needed to immerse yourself in a role? The personality is too big, the face is too recognizable. Does anyone remember the name of Angelina Jolie’s character in Salt? And that isn’t some pompous jerk getting a happy ending in this Reagan era movie… no that’s Tom “Fucking” Cruise. I don’t particularly dislike these actors but they must realize that for all of their success in the movies they have failed at the fundamental chore of acting: making the audience believe you are someone else.
Nicolas Cage is a mega star and cannot hide inside a role but here he chooses a different path. He becomes outrageous. If you think about it, there are precious few movies where Nicolas cage is acting like a human being. Even his acclaimed ones are acclaimed because of his manic, bigger than life impressions. In Captain Correlli’s Mandolin, he acts like a human being and that is his triumph and downfall. Because here we have a mega star actor whom everyone knows and reads about, trying to become a different person without his normal off-the-wall behaviours. And unfortunately, he fails pretty much from the start.
A digression about his accents first. They are terrible. Sometimes they are used wonderfully to add a touch of insanity to the proceedings (Raising Arizona) and sometimes they are just thrown in to a thick frothy gumbo of insanity (Bad Lieutenant). CCM is really trying to be a serious film based on a serious novel and the addition of Nicolas Cage’s Italian accent surrounded by all the earnestness of WWII German-occupied Greece is like a slap in the face to everyone who died for freedom and liberty around the world. Was the a little too strong? OK, I cannot be that hard on him. Even Christian Bale had a hard time with the accent at first, but at least he eases into it a lot better as the movie wore on.
So what we have again is not a movie about an Italian mandolin-playing Captain who falls for a soon-to-be-wed-woman in Greece during WWII but we have a movie about Nic Cage pretending to be an Italian who plays a Mandolin.
Having said that, even with this distraction most of the movie was bearable and I was caught up in the romance. It is a pretty good story and there are some small twists that help to distance itself from a traditional love story. A good love story has the audience at least seeing the humanity of all the main characters. If the happy ending is obvious then it’s no good. I like the fact that we start to like Bale’s character more and more as the movie progressed. The complexity of Penelope’s choice of lover is now shown to us and this complexity is something that most romantic movies lack. This was made possible by Penelope Cruz’s and Christian Bale’s performances. They were subtle and the scenes they shared with Cage provided a contrast in acting styles that in most instances would be problematic to say the least but somehow managed to entice me.
The movie is a slightly-above-mediocre romantic WWII film at best with a Nic Cage performance that was slightly-above-mediocre at best. Which is to say, that this blew my expectations out of the water.
... this movie is an example of how an awful title, and bad trailer (with music) can kill a movie.