There's plenty of period realism. Actually, there's realism, period -- precious little magic -- in the tricky trek of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera" from page to screen.

Director Mike Newell's screen version of Marquez's expansive novel has the daunting task of straddling two centuries over 50-odd years. Set in the steamy, sensual, Colombian port city of Cartagena, it opens with the death of ancient Dr. Juvenal Urbino, by way of introduction to protagonist Florentino Ariza and his undying love for Dr. Urbino's wife.

From there, we flash back to 1879, when Florentino (Javier Bardem), a lowly telegraph clerk, falls madly and permanently in love with the fetching Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). She says she'll marry him if he promises not to make her eat eggplant. It's a small price to pay, and he readily agrees. But her loutish father (John Leguizamo) whisks her away from Florentino -- and from the ongoing civil war and cholera epidemic -- eventually marrying her up with suave, sophisticated Dr. Urbino (Benjamin Bratt).

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'Love in the Time of Cholera'

• Starring: Javier Bardem, Benjamin Bratt, Giovanna Mezzogiorno
• Rating: R for sexual content, nudity and brief language.
• Web site: "Love in the Time of Cholera"

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Poor lovestruck Florentino will carry his torch for the next half-century, biding his time, rising to the top of his uncle's shipping company and consoling himself with a series of sexual conquests -- 622, to be exact, meticulously recorded in his journal -- while patiently stalking Fermina and waiting for Juvenal to die.

One doesn't envy Oscar-winning screenwriter Ronald Harwood ("The Pianist") his task: This excessively melodramatic adaptation catches the novel's flavor but not its soul, reducing the characters' complex psychologies to their most elementary emotional components. And I'm afraid Irish director Newell ("Donnie Brasco," "Four Weddings and a Funeral," "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire") was simply the wrong choice. In addition to its intrinsic romance, "Cholera" is also a kind of rich, rollicking comedy. (Florentino sticks a pacifier in the mouth of one of his conquests, to quiet her.)

Newell's dramatic-comic balance is way off. He lets his makeup artists age the characters inconsistently, assign glued-on Groucho mustaches to the men and put old heads on young bodies, especially, and most unfortunately, in nude shots. The world and the film alike would have been better off without the final geriatric love scene.

And why wasn't this movie in Spanish, like "Pan's Labyrinth"? As it is, the accented English varies wildly with actors hailing from Spain (Bardem), Italy (Mezzogiorno), Colombia (Leguizamo), California (Bratt) and New York (Hector Elizondo).

Ah, well. Bardem as our sad-faced hero (described in the book as "having the personality of an undertaker") makes a valiant effort. This brilliant actor ("The Sea Inside," "Before Night Falls"), with his hypnotically soft, seductive delivery, is much in demand these days ("No Country for Old Men," opening Wednesday). Mezzogiorno, looking like the young Jodie Foster, tries hard to overcome that bad makeup. Fernanda Montenegro as Florentino's doting, loony mother is terrific. And over-the-top Leguizamo, who doesn't look even remotely old enough to be Fermina's father, is awful.

Cinematographer Alfonso Beato, however, gloriously captures the post-colonial decay of Cartagena, its exotic urban and rugged rural ambience alike. Incredibly enough, no major film has been shot in Colombia since "The Mission" (1986).

If we may be permitted a bottom-line baseball analogy that would appeal to Marquez's pal Fidel, "Love in the Time of Cholera" -- at 139 minutes -- is a double stretched into a triple, but thrown out at home.