Does Corelli make sweet music?
The sad little moral in a deeply disappointing version of Louis de Berniere’s well marketed novel, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, is that such movies about love surviving war on a Greek island are best left to those familiar with such latitudes preferably as natives, not tourists. Director John Madden knew how to show Shakespeare In Love. But on the evidence of this conventional and dull movie, underpowered in every respect, he doesn’t know how to show Corelli in love. He’s not helped by the giant miscasting of Nicolas Cage, who doesn’t seem to possess a romantic bone in his body and whose well-worn American face and badly fitting Eye-talian accent can’t salvage a romance that falls from wishful epic into a string of clichés. Its most successful moments are not the love scenes between the captain and the doe-eyed doctor’s daughter, played by Penelope Cruz, but the war scenes that subject the islet of Cephallonia to Stuka bombardment and see Corelli’s occupying forces of hedonistic Italian
