The jungles are lush, the urban scenes are appropriately teeming with humanity and the homes, clothes and carriages of turn-of-the-century Cartagena are intricately textured, as you’d expect from any massive period drama such as this

When a writer’s voice is as distinctive as the Colombian Nobel Prize winner’s, it’s difficult to replicate it on-screen, even though director Mike Newell and screenwriter Ronald Harwood remain largely faithful to “Love in the Time of Cholera” in their wildly flawed adaptation of Garcia Marquez’ sweeping 1985 novel about a decades-old romantic obsession.

2Harwood won an Academy Award for his adaptation of “The Pianist”; here, he maintains much of the original dialogue, but the meaning and emotion behind it is often strangely lacking. So when the elegant Dr. Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt) assures his virgin bride (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) on their honeymoon, “This is going to be a lesson in love,” a line that might have seemed palatable on the page clangs on the ear instead.

Similarly, the lovesick Florentino Ariza, insufficiently fleshed out without the benefit of pages upon pages of back story, comes off as a crazed stalker, a guy who needs to get a life (as well as a sturdier stomach). This, despite that he’s played by Javier Bardem, an actor who’s shown time and la casino again that he has a great capacity for subtlety (to see Bardem at his absolute best, check out his terrifying turn in “No Country for Old Men”).

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During that span, he takes 622 lovers (he keeps a running list of them in his journal) but longs for Fermina regardless of his companion. (One of them is played with endearing vulnerability by Laura Harring, who’s woefully underused. We also see too little of Liev Schreiber as Florentino’s boss and Fernanda Montenegro as his mother.)

Fermina, meanwhile, chose to marry the wealthy and far more socially acceptable Dr. Urbino; she’s lived a comfortable life with him and hasn’t thought of Florentino much until he shows up at her husband’s funeral, expects them to pick up where they left off.

3Newell (“Donnie Brasco,” “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”) is all over the place in terms of tone – Garcia Marquez realized the innate ridiculousness of his characters, while Newell plays it straight – but he does go through the motions beautifully with the help of cinematographer Alfonso Beato. The jungles are lush, the urban scenes are appropriately teeming with humanity and the homes, clothes and carriages of turn-of-the-century Cartagena are intricately textured, as you’d expect from any massive period drama such as this.

It’s the actors themselves who all too often feel out of place.

Mezzogiorno is distractingly miscast as Fermina: lovely, yes, but too old to play her as a teenager and too young to be believable as a gray-haired widow. (The filmmakers wisely went with a younger actor, Unax Ugalde, to play Florentino as a teen.) Her portrayal of the character, who’s supposed to be unflappable in her haughtiness, is also surprisingly inert. Is this rather shy andpersonality-free Fermina the kind of woman for whom Florentino would pine for over half a century?

Making matters worse is the arrival of Catalina Sandino Moreno (“Maria Full of Grace”), who’s so wicked and sexy and vibrant as Fermina’s adventurous cousin, Hildebranda, she makes you wish she’d been cast in the lead. And John Leguizamo, over-the-top as Fermina’s overprotective father, sounds laughably more like a New Yorker than the Colombian he is by birth.

The original songs from Shakira, who’s also from Columbia, are a nice touch, though. Come to think of it, she’d be more fun to watch in the role of Fermina, too.

“Love in the Time of Cholera,” a New Line Cinema release, israted R for sexual content/nudity and brief language. Running time:138 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.

By Christy Lemire