Martin Eden: Italian-ized Jack London novel is equal parts brilliant and exasperating

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B-plus

Fitfully brilliant and almost equally exasperating, Martin Eden is an unconventional Italian adaptation of a 1909 Jack London novel. It features an electric star turn from actor Luca Marinelli, who won the acting prize at last year’s Venice film festival for his role here. 

Director Pietro Marcello - who made his first feature in 2015 after a career in experimental documentaries - takes this 1909 novel from the American novelist, who is best known for stories of adventure and survival such as The Call of the Wild and The Sea-Wolf.  This book, though largely forgotten in the English-speaking world, has enjoyed a robust literary reputation abroad, cited by such literary giants as Leo Tolstoy, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov. In Italy, the novel was adapted into a 1979 mini-series.

Luca Marinelli in Martin Eden.

Written over a two-year period when London, in his early thirties, was at sea, the book falls into the category of a Kunstlerroman (artist’s novel), a fictionalized account of the writer’s life.  The title character is a strapping young dock-worker, originally from Oakland in the original novel, but in Naples, Italy here. 

Actor Marinelli, now 36, is very much in the Brando-Belmondo sensual brute mode, and his magnetism is palpable from his first appearance on the screen. One morning, after a night of carousing, Martin wakens on a boat in the harbour to witness a security guard roughing up a student who is wandering home late from a drunken spree. Martin intervenes, knocking the burly guard to the ground with a punch. The grateful young man, Arturo Orsini (Giustiniano Alpi) invites his rescuer home to his wealthy family’s mansion for breakfast.

The Orsini family regard their rough young guest as something of an amusing primitive, but he catches the special attention of Arturo’s beautiful sister, the poised and radiant young college student Elena (Jessica Cressy). She gazes at the guest like a promising specimen. All that he needs, suggests Elena, is an education. For his part, he doesn’t just fall for her, he wants to be like her.

Back at home in the Naples working-class neighbourhood, Martin lives with his sister and her abusive husband. When he’s not at sea, he takes to studying with the ambitious goal of becoming a famous writer within two years.  Martin becomes a believer of aggressive individualism, adopting the views of Victorian philosopher Herbert Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest.”

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

London himself was a diehard socialist. And after the book came out, he complained in a letter to his friend Upton Sinclair that reviewers had missed its anti-individualist stance. In Marcello’s adaptation, the Italian context has different connotations. Early scenes appear to take place in the 1920s, and Martin’s career coincides with the rise of Fascism. 

But that illusion soon evaporates. The movie is, strangely, not tied to any particular period: Bits of archival historical footage are pebbled throughout, documenting historical moments from early Italian anarchism to Nazi book burning. Clothing, cars and hairstyles and technology evolve, apparently into the 1980s, to the point where Martin seems to be time-travelling through the century. 

After months of writing stories on his Olivetti typewriter and meeting regular rejections, suddenly the tide turns. Encouraged by an aging bohemian socialist aristocrat, Russ Bissemden (Carlo Cecchi), who seems to be one of those hangers-on from Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Martin has his career breakthrough.

Exactly what kind of writer is he? He stands on a political platform and insults union organizers. While the rich confuse him for a socialist, Martin’s philosophy is exactly the opposite: He’s a libertarian crusader, who views socialism as “slavery” and scorns contemporary capitalists as weak-kneed compromisers to state control. He pontificates on sweeping trends of history, earning outrage on every side, and, as one observer notes, drifts steadily toward megalomania. 

The politics of Martin Eden are something of a puzzle. By the last third of the film, Martin, riding in flashy suits behind his chauffeur, has become an insufferable intellectual fraud and a nihilist. His teeth are bad, his hair is streaked in white and when he appears onstage, he performs a kind of insult comedy with press and fans. His power leads to paranoia, and when Elena comes back in his life, he suddenly turns on her in a rage, “If no one had noticed my books, you would have stayed away.”

Near the end of the film, we learn that a war has broken out (a Fascist activist has previously called for a war to “dignify” the country). In one late scene, Martin seems to literally split in half: We see him walking toward the Bay of Naples, led, apparently, by an image of his younger self. 

What Martin Eden adds up to is, a kind of draw. There is much to admire and contemplate in Martin Eden, including Marinelli’s performance, the marvelous range of faces that appear onscreen, the disorienting time shifts and melancholic seascapes that form many backdrops.  While the tension between Martin’s right-wing superman fantasies and working-class status is a rich field, it’s not obvious that there’s a coherent intellectual framework behind the collage of beautiful moments.

Martin Eden. Directed and written by Pietro Marcello. Written by Maurizio Braucci and Pietro Marcello, based on the novel by Jack London. Starring; Luca Marinelli, Jessica Cressy, Carlo Cecchi, Denise Sardisco, Anna Patierno and Giustiniano Alpi. Martin Eden is available from digital TIFF Bell Lightbox Virtual Cinema at https://digital.tiff.net