The movie version of Love in the Time of Cholera doesn't have the drive or the dynamism to be an artistic nightmare. It's more like a dead dream, the kind that leaves nothing more behind in the light of day than a sickly cloud.

The director, Mike Newell, and the screenwriter, Ronald Harwood, have taken novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez's sustained flight of grand passion and analyzed the swooping life right out of it. They've thought their way into an adaptation that needed to be intuitive and "felt," like Marquez's mighty marvel of a book.

Love in the Time of Cholera (New Line Cinema) Directed by Mike Newell. Starring Javier Bardem, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Benjamin Bratt. Rated R. Time 138 minutes.