One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez is one of those towering works of literature that I never managed to finish. The book was too much for me, with so many characters that shared the same names to keep track of, and I had to admit defeat after only a few chapters. Now Netflix has made a miniseries from the first section of the book, covering the lives of the first two generations of the Buendía family, and the early years of the town they help to create in the wilderness, Macondo. Authenticity and respect of the source material is paramount here, because of the status of the novel and its author, so the series was shot in Colombia with many non-professional actors, in Spanish, with a mostly Colombian creative team. There was clearly a lot of effort put into this production, and the show reflects this.
Márquez's novel is one of the primary examples of magical realism, so the story of the Buendías takes place in a world where the dead can stick around as apparitions, the weather seems to change whenever something momentous happens, and curses and bad omens have as much impact on the the characters as science and technology. The story begins with a pair of cousins, José Arcadio Buendía (Diego Vásquez) and Úrsula Iguarán (Marleyda Soto), who marry in spite of the warnings of their family, and leave to find a new home. Eventually they build the town of Macondo, have three children - José Arcadio (Édgar Vittorino), Aureliano (Claudio Cataño), and Amaranta (Loren Sofía) - adopt two more - Rebeca (Akima) and Arcadio (Janer Villarreal) - and live through several decades of upheaval, misfortune, and cyclical destiny.
I can't say much as to whether the miniseries is a good adaptation of the source novel, but I liked it very much as a piece of epic storytelling. We get to watch several characters live out their entire lives, from birth to death over the course of eight episodes. We see the influence of forces beyond the characters' control upon multiple generations. As Macondo grows, it accumulates more problems - plague, politics, and unwelcome outsiders. It's a little difficult to be truly invested in the characters when their choices seem to be predetermined, and so many of them are so stubbornly self-destructive, but I found many of their stories very moving regardless. The elder José Arcadio is a self-styled inventor, alchemist, and dreamer who spends most of his life in the pursuit of impossible wonders, failing at every pursuit, and leaving Úrsula to run the household and look after her brood. Multiple characters fall in love with the worst partners, have brushes with incest, and hold terrible grudges. The performances are strong, with Claudio Cataño, Édgar Vittorino and Marleyda Soto making the strongest impressions.
The production values of the series are very high, with the town of Macondo as its centerpiece. There's a repeated motif of children running through multiple locations, helping to show off the town and the Buendía home as they change over time. The show starts in the 1800s and progresses through the Colombian civil war at the turn of the century, referencing and recreating a good amount of Colombian history in its later chapters. There's not as much emphasis on the magical realism elements as I had expected, with the showrunners devoting most of their attention to the more tangible everyday lives of the Buendías. Characters have visions and José Arcadio befriends an immortal gypsy, Melquíades (Moreno Borja), at one point, but these events are portrayed with restraint and subtlety. So when it does rain flowers, or a plague of insomnia turns everyone into zombie-like shambling figures, the magic of the magical realism has far more impact.
This is the first official dramatization of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and it's a prestige project through and through. I think it's probably too enamored of the source material to work as well onscreen as it could have, and the story needs some additional streamlining, but I had no trouble getting to the end of this one. I'm glad that the miniseries version gave me the opportunity to finally connect to and appreciate this story. I hope that it'll be back for a second series to finish adapting the rest of the novel.
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