Rent Martin Eden (2019)

Enjoyable attempt at filming a long novel - Martin Eden review by TE

This film is a fairly free adaptation of Jack London's novel of the same name. The narrative is intercut with colour-filtered scenes of various symbolic passages in the historical background to Martin's story.

The strongest sections are the earlier ones, where Martin is battling passionately for acceptance as a writer. Once he becomes famous and wealthy the film seems to speed up too much, with lots of significant scenes and words crammed into too small a space.

Politically there is a theme of socialism versus individualism. Martin seems to be spilt between the two, haranguing whoever will listen about the individuality of the artist, whilst giving lots of money to the socialist cause.

The personal relationships also feel as if director Marcello is trying to squeeze a quart into a pint pot. We see vivid glimpses of Martin's courtship of the aristocratic Elena, but very little of the relationship with the woman he actually ends up with.

The cinematography is excellent, and there are many set piece scenes that linger in the memory. However, the overall impression is of a film that might have worked better as a box-set type enterprise.

Engaging adaptation of Jack London's political and personal tale - Martin Eden review by PD

Jack London’s tale of Martin Eden - an unschooled sailor who wants to become a writer after falling in love with an upper-class woman, gets an engaging European makeover here from iconoclastic Italian director Pietro Marcello. Instead of Oakland, the titular character now lives in Naples, and Martin is played, in a solid performance, by an always-intense Luca Marinelli. While the geography of this version of Eden is extremely specific, the time frame is much harder to pin down, with various 20th century influences existing alongside even older material, with brief documentary excerpts woven into the main narrative to provide local colour or draw historical parallels. These are not only well-integrated — the colour grader deserves some kind of award — but add little daubs of contextual information that never intrude on the film’s fictional arc.

The film works best when it concentrates on the protagonist’s personal journey from Parthenopean Nobody to a determined writer fully in command of his language who knows he’ll make it big and then finally (and tragically) does. What's very much weaker however is Marcello's desire to shoehorn in both more than a century’s worth of European struggles and sociopolitical thinking, and the full story of Eden’s downfall after he’s finally become successful. Indeed, these weighty concerns rather capsize the entire enterprise in the final stretch, where the story runs aground on an iceberg of undigested ideas, barely developed themes, and distinctly bad hair choices. Meanwhile, sadly, the subtitles make no attempt to differentiate between Neapolitan, Italian and French, which means that the linguistic subtext, and what it constantly says about class and education, is literally lost in translation for foreign audiences. And despite its length the film doesn’t have enough time to dig very deep into Eden’s growing and then gradually shifting philosophical thinking, and there is no way of knowing what the work of Eden as a writer actually contains — a few stray phrases said out loud notwithstanding — Martin Eden’s sociopolitical and literary considerations finally feel very superficial. Finally, when the last act starts it feels like the viewer needs to quickly run a couple of extra laps to catch up with what has happened during the ellipse and there's not nearly enough evidence to figure out whether what Eden has always preached has suddenly become true and no longer being misunderstood has made him unhappy — or whether it is simply impossible to talk truthfully about the poor and exploited once you’ve become rich and successful and this is what is causing his anguished expressions, bad hair and terrible teeth. How his Darwinian take on socialism, much of it gleaned from the works of Herbert Spencer, figure in all this is also not made clear.

There’s a telling scene in which Martin and Elena come out of a cinema with Elena saying she liked the film and Martin saying he didn’t. It gave her hope, she says, while he doesn't think it reflects the misery of reality or saus anything new. Harshly but perhaps not unjustly, he tells her: “Those who are always full can’t understand the misery of the hungry.” It feels like a moment in which philosophy, literature and the political and class struggles take the upper hand for Martin, and his idealised love for her starts to wane - indeed, not much later, he’s picked up a lowly waitress (Denise Sardisco).

Marinelli is a force of nature in every scene and doesn’t play Eden so much as inhabit him, ensuring that the titular figure is always credibly alive as a determined, foolhardily-in-love young man, an insatiable intellectual-in-the-making and a man bent on beating the odds and becoming a published writer however many of his manuscripts are returned to sender. We might not understand WHY Martin is unhappy when he becomes a success, but Marinelli at least communicates his despair very effectively indeed.

Quality throughout - Martin Eden review by HM

A tremendous tale and a movie to complement it. A young man from the other side of the tracks meets a well to do lady, daughter of an upper middle class Italian family. She encourages him to eductate himself and lift his social status; easier said than done. Who says only GB had or has a class system?

Complications between his lady's family and his socialist friends and leanings make for further dificulties as he tries to become an author and find success. Questions: will he make it? Will her family ever except him? And if success is achieved can he surmount the class barrier and does he even want to?

An analysis of social behaviours, status, motivations and character make for an intriguing and serious watch. I found it absorbing and very real.