Martin Eden

 Martin Eden is a sumptuously mounted free adaptation of Jack London's 1908 autobiographical novel of that name.  Shot in Naples and directed by Pietro Marcello, the film looks like Bertolucci, high praise for the picture's mise-en-scene and gorgeous photography.  It's an impressive movie although it traffics in every possible cliche about writing, politics, and fame.  Apparently aware that we have seen every second of this plot before, Marcello defamiliarizes the material with a number of ingenious techniques -- there is archival footage woven into the film, sequences in which characters speak directly to the camera, bizarre breaches in continuity, and eccentric art direction and set design -- the characters dress and act like people from the turn of the century, but they drive VW buses and Volvos, watch TV, and live at a sea-front full of African and Syrian refugees.  When an old man (cousin to the guy in Bertolucci's 1900 who announces that Verdi has died), a sort of town crier proclaims that the "war" has begun, we don't know to what war the grizzled, little fellow is referring..  This approach to the past as being a sort of present-day but without cell-phones and computers works okay, but it seems a bit contrived to allow television into the movie but not the internet.  This is particularly problematic in Martin Eden because the book involves the travails of the hero in getting his writing published -- the viewer wants to tell the guy to just become an internet "influencer".  

Martin Eden is a sailor knocking around Naples.  In an early scene, we see him having sex with a girl who appears to have met him on a cruise ship.  (Some of the film is so elliptical as to be incompetent).  This woman shows up later as Eden's companion in the scenes that document his crack-up.  A flash-forward, impossible to construe until late in the film, shows a haggard guy with red-rimmed eyes and bad teeth using a reel-to-reel tape recorder to announce that the individual genius fights the world with words as his weapons -- this turns out to be the credo of the hero as announced toward the end of the movie.  The first two-thirds of the picture are the best, possibly because they are the most cliched and, therefore, most readily accessible parts of the film.  Eden rescues a young man from a beating inflicted by wharf-side thug (we don't know why the kid is being thrashed).  The young man turns out to be a wealthy man's son and, when the bourgeois family reward the handsome sailor for his kindness, he explores the family's elegant fin-de-siecle library, choosing to read Baudelaire of all writers.  Elena, the rich man's daughter, becomes a sort of mentor to Eden and helps him with his speech and grammar.  (Commentators on the film note that the movie was shot in a Neapolitan dialect difficult for Romans or northern Italians to even understand.)  Eden decides to become a writer and, after acquiring a little portable typewriter,faithfully pounds away at the device.  He writes pathetic stories about the poor, including a tale of a little crippled boy that is effective but banal.  No one wants his stories.  In fact, no one even opens the envelopes -- they are simply "returned to sender", something that seems odd, but we get the point.  Eden retreats into the country to become a farm laborer, living with a kindly middle-aged woman, Maria, and her children.  His love affair with Elena founders when she demands that he get a normal job and "make something of himself" -- an odd request since her family is wealthy and, it would seem, that Eden could indulge his avocation.  Eden meets a Socialist named Russ Brissenden who is dying of tuberculosis (what else?).  Brissenden urges Eden to write for the proletariat.  Physical labor in the boondocks weakens Eden (usually it's the opposite) and he collapses.  He seems to be on his death bed when a check comes in -- a magazine has purchased one of his stories and, suddenly, publishers are clamoring for his work.  Brissenden dies and, apparently, Eden has his friend's magnum opus, something called "Ephemera" published. (Critics claim that Eden wrote the poem under his dead friend's name.)  We see an impressive archival image of a mighty sailing ship with immense masts sinking; the next archival image will be the becalmed boat from Limite, the Brazilian avant-garde film.  Suddenly, Eden is famous and wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of lucre.  But he is much deteriorated -- he looks like a terminally ill junkie with rotten teeth and bleary eyes.  Eden is living with the woman with whom he had sex at the beginning of the movie.  His agent wants him to make a promotional trip to the United States.  At a press conference, staged like a nineteenth century lecture, Eden espouses individualist theories that are so extreme they would make Ayn Rand blush.  He denounces Socialism as an ideology for slaves and spouts pseudo-Nietzschean blather about evolution.  (He has become a follower of the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer -- a reference that will undoubtedly be baffling to most people who see this movie, although there is, in fact, lots of talk about Spencer and his theories -- apparently, an aspect of the source novel that is here faithfully reproduced.)  Elena makes an appearance.  Now that Eden is rich and famous, she's interested in him again.  But Eden angrily rejects her -- one of the few things he does in the last third of the picture that seems fair and reasonable.  Eden has a hallucination and sees his younger self striding along the boulevard.  He follows the apparition to the sea shore and, apparently to avoid traveling to the USA, he swims out toward the sunset -- presumably committing suicide.  

It's hard to take much of this seriously.  But the picture is extremely entertaining.  It's the kind of movie in which perky upbeat Europop is mixed with Debussy and somber music by Bach.  The hero played by Luca Marinelli looks like a young version of Burt Lancaster and has smoldering eyes, although he lacks Lancaster's physical panther-like grace and lumbers around with a curiously gawky, staggering gait that is faintly endearing.  The opening shots suggest the director's own ideology -- we see the Italian anarchist Erricco Malatesta kissing a baby while all the time smoking a big stogie (that seems to menace the child).  The film, indeed, is an anarchic mix of styles -- there are luminous, still landscapes, close-ups of glistening fruit in the manner of Dovhenko, montages of smiling sailors that look like they belong with Eisenstein outtakes, sepia shots staging the bathos in Eden's short stories (a little crippled kid with a crutch like Tiny Tim limping through a picturesque slum).  The first two-thirds of the film although extremely predictable and, even, banal is staged with real verve.  The abrupt shift into Eden's mostly inexplicable decline comes so quickly and without warning that it is jarring.  The part of the film is insulting to those of us (most of the audience) who never had the opportunity to be destroyed by too much money, too much fame, too many beautiful women.  In other words, Eden expires from problems that we would all like to have and so this part of the movie rings more than a little hollow.  The theme of the movie seems to be that Herbert Spencer will always lead you astray and that the ideology of rugged individualism is a fraud.  I don't know anyone who reads Herbert Spencer anymore; Ayn Rand's form of rugged individualism remains a spectral force in American politics, although I don't know anyone who really espouses her ideas either.  The film is pretty, exciting, ingeniously made, and a little  empty.