CAPTAIN CORELLI’S MANDOLIN

Louis de Bernières’s 1994 novel Corelli’s Mandolin, a love story set on the Italian-held Greek island of Cephallonia during World War II, took a symphonic approach to its complex material. Multi-themed and multi-voiced, it missed the occasional note but swept one up nonetheless.

In his screen adaptation of the book, John Madden, the maestro behind the chamber piece Shakespeare in Love, is off-key and at throughout. Let’s start with the voices — why the corny accents? When Nicolas Cage as the titular Italian captain starts in on his paisan spiel, it sounds like Nicolas Cage faking an Italian accent. Be that as it may, he grows in lunky appeal, a big man telling dumb jokes and hunched over a tiny mandolin to woo his beloved Pelagia (Penélope Cruz in her best English-language performance, which is not saying much), a fiery Greek and his sworn enemy.

As for themes, the love story with WW2 as a backdrop would seem to have been sunk for good after Pearl Harbor, but Madden gives it another shot, sacrificing in the process the book’s dense fugue of historical tragedy and individual redemption. Thereby diminished are the stories of Carlo (Piero Maggió) and his unrequited love, of Pelagia’s fiancé Mandras (Christian Bale) and his seduction by the Communists, and of the Good German Günter (David Morrissey), whose love of authority outweighs his love of music. Not to mention the incidents seen from the point of view of a pine marten. John Hurt rings true as Pelagia’s crusty, pedantic father, Dr. Iannis, but the rest is a noisy pastorale without true resonance or climaxes.

— Peter Keough