Sweeping Adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ Flows Between Grit and Fantasy

Alci Rengifo

“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.” The opening line of Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is one of the most famous openings in all of Spanish language literature. The Colombian Nobel laureate’s magnum opus helped launch the style known as magical realism, which has cast an influence over world literature ever since. For decades, the novel was thought unfilmable. Netflix took up the challenge and now we are getting the limited series “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which plays it so safe it opens with the exact same line from the novel’s first page. Ambitious and certainly massive, it is not boring but not exactly “magical” either. 

Netflix again offers us Part 1, with a date for Part 2 not yet revealed. Sticking to the overall premise of the book as a generational family saga set in 19th century Colombia, the tale kicks off with José Arcadio Buendía (Marco Antonio González) and Úrsula Iguarán (Susana Morales) as young lovers and first cousins. Their relationship causes a stir among their relatives in this rural corner of the country. Fears abound that their offspring will be monstrous deformities. Úrsula has even been fitted with a kind of chastity underwear that keeps José literally locked out of her sex. When a local mocks the marriage, José kills him. José and Úrsula, along with some supporters, leave and settle in a swamp area deeper in the jungle. Here they start the town of Macondo, which has an egalitarian spirit initially. As the Buendía family grows, their story will encompass much of the human experience from love to war, despair and age.

Since “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was published in 1967, its characters and places have become legendary in Latin America, especially in Márquez’s home country. Say “Macondo” and most Colombians will know exactly what you’re referring to. Márquez’s work has always proven elusive for those trying to adapt it mainly because his style thrives fully on the reader’s imagination. In 2007, Mike Newell attempted to film “Love in the Time of Cholera,” the author’s second most famous work, and the result was pure cornball. This one starts off on the right foot by casting Colombians and shooting in landscapes that feel immersive and authentic. The richness of the natural world threatens to overtake the characters, because we are but small players on this earth. The music by Camilo Sanabria and Juancho Valencia combines orchestral sweep with Colombian folk music. Casting wise, there isn’t the pressure to hire marquee names to fill every character because the story itself is entertaining enough. 

This is a sweeping family saga that says much about South American culture while having the universal appeal of how our family trees expand and define us. The novel’s key progressions are all brought to life starting with the founding of Macondo and then the arrival of Melchiades the Alchemist (Gino Montesinos) and his band of gypsies, who introduce José to great inventions that make him go mad. José and Úrsula then begin having the children who will form the real heart of the saga, José Arcadio (Thiago Padilla), Aureliano (Jerónimo Echeverría), and Amaranta (Luna Ruíz). As Macondo grows, outside interference does as well when government troops move in and factions begin to form. Aureliano is the one who will become a colonel in a civil war reminiscent of Colombia’s terrible Thousand Days war, when conservative and liberal factions went into open combat. The event that turns Aureliano into a fighter is the tragic death of his love, Remedios (Cristal Aparicio), who is so young she’s practically a child when Aureliano sees her when he’s 20. Remedios’ surprising death will occur because of Amaranta’s own jealousies surrounding a man she wants to marry, who loves someone else. 

Here the producers deserve credit for not watering down the material. The novel is a product of a particular time, recounting a specific Latin American world where particular relationships took place that we would not find acceptable today. Though, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” does verge too much on melodrama when it comes to its treatment of sex, as if it needs to feed into the idea of hot-blooded lustful stereotypes in Latin stories. Márquez’s writing was certainly full of desire, but it also tends to be bittersweet. Amaranta’s jealousy and loneliness will lead to tragedy, of the kind that will haunt the family for the rest of the story. As pure storytelling the series, even when it can meander slightly, keeps one engaged with its heated passions and the larger sense of the Buendía clan forming part of a national myth. This is how folktales are born.

While “One Hundred Years of Solitude” works as a pure saga, what always eludes filmmakers trying to adapt the material is Márquez’s magical realist angle. His stories take on fantastical, supernatural elements that are merely part of life and scenery, like actual folk myths. Visually this series does evoke some of his great images, including the founders of Macondo walking through a river of yellow flowers. The man José kills early in the story returns as a ghost silently standing around his home like a guilty conscience. There is also Úrsula’s kitchen with its expanding loafs of bread and the gypsies’ contraptions. Yet, it is all so grounded and stark that it never takes on the hallucinatory, dreamlike tone of the text. The dead man’s ghost looks like another extra. Film and literature are two different mediums, but magical realism is not alien to visual media. Among world directors, perhaps only Marjane Satrape (“Persepolis,” “Chicken With Plums”) has the perfect style for a magical realist adaptation. Such a qualm aside, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is still an impressive achievement and Netflix can be commended for bringing a renowned literary classic to the screen on this kind of scale. There are so many good stories to tell that illuminate who we all are.  

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” begins streaming Dec. 11 on Netflix.