When someone makes a book I love into a movie, I'm always hesitant to see it. A handful of filmmakers (notably the late, great John Huston) have had a gift for translating literature to the screen, but about 99 times out of a hundred, I leave the theater rolling my eyes.

British director Mike Newell has had some success bringing books to film ("Donnie Brasco," "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire"), so I didn't grumble right away when I heard he had undertaken "Love in the Time of Cholera," the romantic, lusty, elegiac 1985 novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The Colombian novelist is one of the giants of world literature and one of my favorite writers. But I went to the screening of "Love in the Time of Cholera" hopefully -- after all, the author himself had blessed the project.

How does that story fare on film? Of course, a great deal of it is simply pared away, and Newell straightens the mythical, looping structure of Garcia Marquez's book into a more linear storyline. Filmed largely on location in Cartagena, Colombia, the movie is spot-on visually, capturing the dreamlike, crumbling colonial city hemmed by a riotous tropical landscape that Garcia Marquez paints so vividly.

The film benefits from some strong actors, notably Spanish star Javier Bardem as Florentino. Bardem's sweet, sly performance evokes Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, a fitting inspiration. The Tramp was funny, touching, resilient and extravagantly romantic just like Florentino.

Coming from the usually drop-dead sexy Bardem, the performance is not just inspired but astounding.

The American actor Benjamin Bratt ("Law & Order") elegantly inhabits Urbino, a man who is handsome, charming, accomplished, powerful, urbane and a devoted husband and boy, does he ever know it.

Unfortunately, the weak link in the triangle is the supposedly irresistible Fermina Daza. Italian actor Giovanna Mezzogiorno is certainly lovely, but so chilly and affectless it's hard to see her creating half a century's worth of explosive chemistry. The wonderful Colombian actor Catalina Sandino Moreno ("Maria Full of Grace") strikes far more sparks as Fermina's cousin, and I kept wondering why she didn't have the lead.

The film version of "Love in the Time of Cholera" gets a lot of things right. But it leaves a lot more things out. For moviegoers who haven't read the book, I suspect the movie may seem fragmented, pretty but not emotionally resonant.

Garcia Marquez's story is so complex, his prose so magical, his characters so rich, that a two-hour movie even one made with as much attention to the spirit of the book as this one can't really be anything more than a highlights reel. Read the book.