‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ Review: Netflix’s Gorgeous, Ambitious Adaptation Captures Some of the Novel’s Magic

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Three years ago, Max released a limited series adaptation of a well-regarded novel that blended magic realism and an all-too-real snapshot of a global pandemic. Dreamy and uncomfortably familiar, bleak and yet bursting with hope, Patrick Somerville’s translation of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven has settled into a reputation as a modern classic — THR placed it at No. 42 on our list of the 50 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century So Far — but owing to the timing of its premiere, the show was initially a little lost. It missed deadlines for many critics’ Top 10 lists and didn’t attract the awards attention you might expect based on its subsequent acclaim. It had to take a long path to adoration.

We’ll have to see if a similar fate awaits Netflix‘s adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel with one of the most daunting reputations — for excellence and for unfilmability — imaginable. The series launches on Dec. 11 after many Top 10 lists have been filed (spoiler: not ours!) and I’ve already seen at least one awards-giving organization post nominations that strongly suggest a lack of time for its membership to watch.

The link between Station Eleven and One Hundred Years of Solitude goes beyond that, though. Like Station Eleven, One Hundred Years of Solitude is immersive and transporting, demanding ample buy-in from viewers — all the more so with its dialogue in Spanish and various native dialects, its cast of largely unknown Colombian actors (and Colombian filming locations), its ensemble of characters who share a bloodline and maybe a half-dozen recirculated names and a storyline that’s at once sprawling and intimately limited.

And far more than Station Eleven, which hit the screen only seven years after its source novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude comes with decades of pent-up expectations, and with the absolute and iron-clad guarantee that it will be unable to live up to the most passionate imaginings of its most passionate fans.

As best I can put it, the series that creators José Rivera and Natalia Santa (he’s Puerto Rican, she’s Colombian) have made is ambitious and honorable. Their show — these eight episodes cover half of the book, with eight more to go — aspires to convey the tone and feel of Márquez’s poetic prose. It uses as many of his words as possible, to the degree that almost anything you hear that sticks in your head is likely to be taken from the book verbatim.

It doesn’t always work. The more it falls on the “realism” side of “magic realism,” the less convincing it is. (Did I say the exact opposite thing about HBO’s solid recent Like Water For Chocolate? Yup!) And there are things that pretty obviously play completely differently when you have to see them acted out and filmed than when you can paint your own picture in your head, and that probably were safest kept on the page.

But man, One Hundred Years of Solitude is breathlessly beautiful at times, lyrical and alive and brimming with visual and intellectual ideas. Directors Alex García López and Laura Mora (he’s Argentine, she’s Colombian) achieve some things that had me immediately going back and rewatching certain shots and scenes. For at least five of the eight episodes, I was fully caught up in this show’s spell.

Like the book, the series begins with this killer line: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

There’s no way to describe the “plot” of One Hundred Years of Solitude that does it any particular justice.

In the coarsest summary possible, it’s the story of two cousins (Marco Antonio González’s José Arcadio Buendía and Susana Morales’ Úrsula) who just want to be able to have sex and not be haunted by the ghost of the cockfighter he murdered. So they lead a caravan of their chums off into the mountains and through a swamp. When José has a dream of a mirrored city, he takes it as a sign to stop, build a village and follow a 100-year progression of civilization from there.

Or, put a different way, One Hundred Years of Solitude is the six-generation story of the Buendía clan, founders of the town of Macondo, built on cousin-loving, free enterprise, secular kindness and dreams. The first season takes us through half of the generations, through births and deaths and the arrival of the Catholic Church and the Colombian government and all manner of interfering forces, some for good and some for evil. It’s not really about anything and it’s also absolutely about everything — literal and metaphorical ghosts, the recursive past, the dangers of institutionalized belief (religious or political), the pros and cons of incest. Everything.

Márquez’s novel is mostly dialogue-free, so Santa, Rivera and the other writers have to figure out how to deliver omniscient narration taken heavily from the text and dialogue taken from repurposed snippets of the text, along with plot-progressing dialogue that you know immediately has nothing to do with the text because it’s blunt and occasionally distracting. I wonder if there might have been any way to let the visuals and the voiceover steer the series almost entirely, because everything plays better when the show is at its most figurative and least literal.

The last three episodes in particular are dominated by the burgeoning conflict between liberal and conservative forces that becomes Colombia’s Thousand Days’ War. Though there are bravura and brutal action sequences meant to contrast with so much that was previously poetic and pastoral, it’s jarring effect that I didn’t find gratifying. The series is a reverie, interrupted by something very conventional (and not particularly historically detailed, if that’s what we’re aiming for).

Generally, the drama does spectacularly well with abiding by a primal sense of magical realism — the finding of wonderment in the banal and the insertion of banality into the wondrous. I adored how casually López and Mora treat miraculous little snapshots of ideas from Márquez, like the orphan girl who arrives in Macondo carrying a bag containing her father’s bones or the character who spends years tied to a chestnut tree. Those and countless other background notes of whimsy are rarely spotlighted with a close-up or with a “Look what we’re doing here!” musical sting. These are just the things that happen in this universe.

Of course, the same is true of myriad incidents of incest, pedophilia and sexual abuse that are treated with a similar level of casualness. The series’ lens is largely non-judgmental and while it would take a very foolish person to say that the series endorses or even romanticizes perversity, putting such behavior in an environment in which so much is romanticized forces you to confront it in a way that you don’t on the page.

So I didn’t love that, but I loved the way the directors erase the confines of time and space with their camera. That frequently means long tracking shots. The introduction of Macondo’s physical geography through an uninterrupted shot in which a small naked boy runs from house to house for three minutes is a marvel. Even better is a three-plus minute shot that takes the world from day to night to day again and allows years to pass as a single character and some CG ants go through a single house.

Márquez writes in images and in set pieces and I thought the most ambitious among those, like the Insomnia Plague that hits Macondo and causes residents to lose memories and words, were handled well. But again, if you have a deeper investment in the book than I do, what you see on Netflix won’t be what was in your mind.

Recent years have illustrated that TV wants to be ambitious enough to integrate elements magic realism into its storytelling but, as film discovered long ago — see Bille August’s The House of Spirits or Mike Newell’s Love in the Time of Cholera — it isn’t easy. For every Underground Railroad adaptation, there’s a The Luminaries or All the Light We Cannot See adaptation.

One Hundred Years of Solitude may not be as good as Underground Railroad or even Station Eleven, but it’s a worthy and admirable capper for a year of often exceptional prestige adaptations.