The new film “Martin Eden”—an adaptation of Jack London’s 1908-09 novel, from the director Pietro Marcello—is an iteration of an old fallacy: the notion that, if a movie’s subject involves intellectual matters, the movie will be intellectually substantial. What ideas “Martin Eden” has are borrowed straight from the novel; what substance the novel has the movie removes, leaving its one big, notable idea emblazoned on it like a sticker on the bumper of a car being sold in a commercial—the selling of the vehicle is the point, and the message is a matter of decorative vanity.
The movie’s script (written by Marcello and Maurizio Braucci) retains the basics of the book’s story: Martin Eden (Luca Marinelli), a poor laborer and fervent autodidact, falls in love with a wealthy young woman (here, named Elena and played by Jessica Cressy), whose brother he has rescued from a street fight. The two plan to marry, but, yearning to become a writer, Martin endures years of poverty, which the rich Elena looks on dubiously, and then gets involved with socialist politics, which she can’t stand. Then Martin succeeds; he becomes a rich, famous, and arrogant writer, whose ideology—actually anti-socialist, essentially libertarian—drives him away from both the rich and the poor and leaves him unmoored, isolated, and desperate.
Marcello moves the action from Oakland to Naples and updates it to a vague modern time of fashionable nostalgia—something sixties-to-seventies-ish. He nods as passingly to this era and its fashions (clothing, cars, typewriters, furniture) as to a library glimpsed from a foggy window. (As for its history, he ignores it altogether.) Along with that shift to a floating time, the movie is ludicrously deprived of physicality, of process, of dramatic development. A scene of Martin dictating epigrams into a tape recorder seethes with delight in the small reel-to-reel device, with its handheld microphone, that a props person found in a thrift shop or a corporate archive; the device, not Marinelli or anything he’s saying, is the star of the scene. “Martin Eden” is a movie that trades on stylish fetish objects but presents them with no sense of cinematic style—there isn’t an image in the film that displays any imaginative or aestheticized composition, and its dramatic conception is similarly literal and lumpish.
To show that Martin is a manual laborer, Marcello offers a quick shot of him in a boat’s engine room; to show that Martin is an aspiring intellectual, Marcello supplies a quick shot of him scribbling. Elena suggests that Martin get an education; poof—he’s sitting for an exam in Roman history. The movie is full of the “poof” experience: quick moments that flit from one to the next, stating facts visually with no sense of process, of development, of effort. Nobody goes from one place to the other with any sense of duration or contemplation, because Marcello gives the impression of being unable to imagine what the characters might do, might say—and, above all, might think—in the interstices of events. No character has any discernible personality or mind; they appear onscreen only as if to exemplify a line in a screenplay that states a fact. (Even run-of-the-mill studio comedies and action films display more of a sense of dramatic construction and physical connection.) The characters have no inner life (and, for that matter, attenuated outer lives) because Marcello endows them with no creative capacity, no sense of power or potential. Marcello’s thin, earnest cinematic imagination—the absurdity of its index-card-like display of information about Martin Eden that fills the movie with literary names, with books seen but hardly heard, writings filling volumes, which go unopened, with energy and passion that are merely signified—sacrifices the emotional climate of the novel, its overheated sense of first-person urgency and drive. The tangled intensity of London’s quasi-autobiographical bildungsroman is straightened out, slicked down, and scrubbed away.
The only distinctive aspect of Marcello’s filmmaking is his reliance on sepia-toned archival footage, cut to snippets as mere evocations of a distant political history that comes in for no examination. Heavy industry, seafaring, strikes, postwar destruction: the film merely acknowledges the turbulence of twentieth-century Italian history in the decades prior to the ones in which “Martin Eden” appears to be set and altogether ignores the political conflicts and ideological stakes of the time in which it ostensibly takes place. Where the novel seems made amid the center of unstable and tumultuous times, with a sense of politically engaged, intellectually ardent necessity, the movie merely decorates the underlying heap of history like an artificially colored and sweetened cherry.
The one noteworthy idea in the movie concerns Martin’s politics—which, as in the novel, involve an obsessive investment in the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, a sort of scientificized Nietzscheanism or proto-Ayn-Randian individualism. Martin yields to such a philosophy with the same vanity and sense of heroism that afflicts many other presumptively or presumptuously self-made men. Despite Martin’s deep sympathy for the poor, the oppressed, the laboring—the class from which he comes—he spews contempt both at the corporatist protectionism of the bourgeoisie and at the trade unionism of workers.
Yet here, too, the film’s lack of history is glaring. In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, the leading political party in Italy was the Communist Party, and its causes went far beyond trade unionism, which was a given. There is a significant scene that asserts (but never characterizes) Martin’s involvement with a revolutionary group, but it isn’t clear whether that group is the Red Brigades or another one, because the scene comes out of the blue—Marcello offers no notion of Martin’s contacts with the group or his conversations with its leaders. For that matter, Marcello pays less attention in this brief scene to the connection between its two characters than to the revolutionary agent’s Volkswagen Beetle. (Does that make the group the Baader-Meinhof gang? Who knows?)
Martin, in his hostility to unions and to socialism, proves to be wrong—not only in ignoring the economic, social, and political power that unions provide but in the personal sense of detaching himself from his own class while also repudiating the bourgeois and upper-class society to which his success and fame admits him. Rather than listening to workers explain what they want and why, he arrogantly decrees what’s best for them. The very subject of the movie is a failure to listen—and the price that the uneducated person pays by being vulnerable to flashy-sounding but flimsy ideologies. The story is a warning to intellectuals; the lesson learned is that Martin would do well to listen—not only for the good of those who have something to say or of society at large but, especially, for his own benefit. Yet even the tragedy to which Martin’s blowhard vanity inevitably leads is filmed, in Marcello’s hollow adaptation, with a picture-postcard pettiness.
