Martin Eden

Based on a novel by Jack London that I haven't read, the Italian film Martin Eden (on MUBI) won an award at Venice for its charismatic star, Luca Marinelli. He has the physique of the lusty sailor, and the feverish eyes of the autodidact who swears to become a successful writer, inspired by his love for a lovely bourgeoise. Set in working-class Naples in a somewhat indeterminate time period, rather than the Oakland of the 1909 novel, the movie is best when it shows Martin as an aspiring writer. The last sequence, in which he is a jaded, disappointed success who rails at his fans and screams at his former love, is too schematic. When he commits suicide by swimming out into the ocean, we believe it, but it feels like a disease of the ego. Espousing a radical individualism and rejecting socialism, Eden ends up isolated, pretentious, and vain. Maybe that was Jack London's point, but the film leaps too quickly from his days of struggle to his burn-out, so he just comes off as obnoxious rather than principled.