My World of Flops That's a Spicy Melodrama Case File #180/The Travolta/Cage Project #63 Captain Corelli's Mandolin (2001)

A DVD cover that truly conveys, “These are the faces of the actors who star in this movie”

As you have undoubtedly forgotten, early in his film career Nicolas Cage made the unusual choice to star in a grim, ugly 1989 Italian movie called Tempo di uccidere as a soldier in Mussolini’s army who thinks he has contracted leprosy after sexually assaulting an Ethiopian woman. 

Even more bewilderingly, Cage deliberately eschewed anything even vaguely approximating an Italian accent to play an Italian man in an Italian movie. On the contrary, Cage seemed to go out of his way to be as contemporary and American as possible. 

When Cage once again found himself playing a soldier in Mussolini’s army in a period drama a little over a decade later in 2001’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin he was obviously intent on learning from his mistakes. 

He wasn’t going to blunder the way he did back in the late 1980s. Instead he was going to make brand new mistakes completely different, even antithetical, to the mistakes he made before. 

To make up for his distracting, egregious lack of an accent in Tempo di uccidere Cage decided that he would overcompensate wildly with a distractingly thick, egregiously fake Italian accent that makes him sound like a cross between heroic video game plumber Mario and notorious blood-sucker Count Dracula. 

If the repellent sex criminal Cage played in Tempo di uccidere was utterly devoid of redeeming characteristics then Captain Corelli would be nothing but wonderful qualities. 

Captain Corelli loves to sing! He loves to eat delicious food under the bewitching Greek sun! He loves to play the titular mandolin! He loves to dance! But more than anything, Captain Corelli loves to love! He loves love! He loves life! 

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin wants you to love Captain Corelli (and to a lesser extent his mandolin) as passionately as he loves literally every good thing in the world, particularly the lovely ladies and the wine! 

Actually, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin needs you to love its title character and will do anything to make that happen. It’s intent on shoving joy, wonder and a deep appreciation for the unimaginable gift that is life down the audience’s collective throat. 

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin takes place towards the end of World War II on the Greek island of Cephalonia, which is depicted as being less idyllic than a magical land of beauty and romance. 

Shakespeare in Love director John Madden’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning hit that made his name and reputation is pure tourism porn. For the first two acts literally every shot belongs on a poster for the Greek tourism board. 

Outside a World War rages but for the cartoonish Greek caricatures of Cephalonia life continues as it always has, full of happiness, celebration and simplicity.

Then the island is occupied by Italian soldiers more interested in wine, women and particularly song than the dreary business of war. These soldiers are somewhat confusingly and counter-intuitively lovers rather than fighters. 

They’d rather sing opera guzzle, red wine and frolic innocently with beautiful maidens than do Fascist stuff and also kill people. That suits the movie fine, since its vision of war initially involves lots of fun in the sun and little in the way of violence, death or fighting. 

In Cephalonia the passionate Captain Corelli falls instantly in love with Pelagia (Penelope Cruz), the beautiful, headstrong daughter of Dr. Yiannis (John Hurt). Pelagia, however, is romantically involved with Mandras, a fellow villager who seems deeply unremarkable upon first glance and grows less impressive with each appearance. 

For reasons I cannot begin to fathom, this Greek-fried doofus is played by Christian Bale a year after his career-making performance as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho and four years before Batman Begins would catapult him to super-stardom. 

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin offers the surreal spectacle of Patrick Batman and Peter Loew, all-time great New York douchebags, squaring off against one another in a maudlin exercise in shameless, sticky, Miramax-style sentimentality while sabotaged by Greek accents as strong as they are oppressively phony. 

Bale’s resentful simpleton has nothing to offer his beautiful girlfriend while Captain Corelli has EVERYTHING to offer. When Captain Corelli is smiling that big movie star mile of his and sensually plucking the strings of his mandolin everything in the world seems right, which is curious, considering he is a Fascist soldier fighting in World War II. 

In Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, the Greek response to being occupied by Fascists is essentially, “Fuck you, you Italian pigs. You can occupy our homes and businesses but you’ll never conquer us, scum”, to which the Fascists answer considerately, “Totally understandable! We’ll do everything in our power to make this not only painless but deeply enjoyable for everyone involved. There’s no reason a Fascist occupation has to be anything less than delightful.” 

The film’s depiction of life during wartime is closer tonally to a Disney cartoon than Saving Private Ryan. It’s pure escapism, a sixty million dollar glorified commercial for Olive Garden that argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, war is not, in fact, hell, but rather the best vacation of your life, full of music, romance, glorious scenery and memories that will last a lifetime! 

One of Cage’s great strengths as an actor is his chemistry with his female leads. Cage is a romantic guy; he believes passionately in things. That comes through in his performances. 

That, alas, is not true of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Cruz is weirdly devoid of joie de vivre while Cage suffers from a crazy excess. He’s not just an unusually, even oppressively happy and romantic dude: he’s the living personification of passion. 

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin seems perversely committed to being the first war movie with no war, no violence, no conflict, just a bunch of happy, smiling people living life to the fullest in paradise. 

Then the Nazis have to go and ruin everything. Captain Corelli’s irrepressible life force endears him to nerdy, shy German officer Captain Günther Weber (David Morrissey, everybody’s favorite Morrissey), particularly after he helps him with the ladies. 

Sadly if predictably, not all German soldiers are good dudes. In fact a lot of them are literally Nazis and if online discourse and the History Channel have taught us anything, it’s that Nazis are the worse. 

So even though the Italians are ready to surrender to the Allies, those nasty Nazis insist on disarming them by force and when the good Captain joins up with Greek rebel forces they unleash a bloody massacre he’s lucky to survive.

For its first two acts Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a sumptuous, gorgeously filmed travelogue in which broad Greek and Italian stereotypes engage in an all out joy-off to determine which ethnicity loves life more. 

When Captain Corelli’s Mandolin turns into an actual war movie with violence and death and noble soldiers being machine-gunned en masse it feels weirdly jarring and tonally wrong. 

Cage perversely made two movies where he played Italian soldiers in World War II at very different stages of his life and career. They’re very different movies where he played very different characters but they’re nevertheless similar in how they deeply misunderstand their star’s extraordinary appeal.

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