Alex Garcia Lopez and Laura Mora’s eight-episode adaptation of the classic 1967 novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is faithful in story, but not in spirit.
Both the original, written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the show follow the surrealistic generational troubles of the large Buendia family as they traverse through a rough reimagining of Colombian history.
The novel’s breadth demands more than the two hours of a movie. Yet, though the length of a TV series seemed to fit, the production value of one felt inadequate. Marquez’s novel represents its characters’ complex emotions with magical, sometimes confusing images, but the show does so with a boring and cliche-filled realism.
Grief leads characters to wander aimlessly or to stand around while the camera captures a maudlin stare in shallow focus, such as when Aureliano (Jeronimo Echeverria Monsalve) just seems to sadly wander around town after Ursula (Marleyda Soto) leaves, almost as if the cameras wait for the episode to end.
However, in the novel, the characters don’t have these moments of melancholic dawdling, they bury themselves in intense magical action so as to not see their lack of social mobility and subjugation; it’s basically the entire point of the plot.
The vibrancy of the novel hides its sadness, but the show just wallows in it. There are numerous scenes of struggling travel and painful birthing that are overblown, overly detailed and not even in the book while the excitement of the book is absent.
Though the worst thing might be in how it actually does engage with the surreality of the characters’ actions and emotions. It feels like an odd break, or a plot hole, whenever they act out or are pulled by some inner spirit when in the book it is the foundational emotional engagement we get with these characters. The characters are treated as wholly normal with a few abnormalities while the book treats them oppositely.
For example, as Arcadio (Janer Villareal) comes of age into a life of lust, his mental distortions of the women he’s with are never realized on-screen during his scenes with them. The attraction is completely taken out of the magical and psychological context and feels empty.
Such a unique novel deserves a bold, directorial vision, but Lopez and Mora can’t handle it. They choose to walk through the events blandly and drag out the meaning until it makes no impact at all.
Don’t waste your time on such a long series, with eight more hour-long episodes to come. Just read the book.
