Young Werther: Goethe's Romantic-with-an-Iron-Whim Seems a Bit Stalkerish Today

By Jim Slotek

Rating: C

As the narcissism-driven pursuit of a dream-girl that is Young Werther plays out, the set-in-Toronto sort-of-romcom begins to show its anachronistic hand. It is something from another time.

And by another time, I don’t mean 1774, when young Johann Wolfgang Goethe wrote his career-making novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, about a deeply sensitive young man whose unrequited love for a married woman drives him to suicide. The movie is so loosely adapted from the book, it’s attached by a thread.

I’m speaking of the 1980s, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The two movies don’t match narratively nor as anarchically, but both lionize a glib, well-off, entitled young man who ignites a series of disruptive (and sometimes bithely hurtful) events, seemingly because he’s bored.

Werther (Douglas Booth) reels in the newly-crowned woman-of-his-dreams (Alison Pill)r.

That wasn’t the take back then, of course. Ferris was a rebel, someone who did what he felt like. But with repeated viewings, the question had to rise to the surface: Who was this guy who felt his whims superseded other people’s?

So, never mind 1774. It is possible that Young Werther would have found ticket purchase in the ‘80s. Whether it appeals to you today may depend on whether you’ve subsequently decided Ferris was kind of an asshole.

The film doubles down on the Goethe connection with an opening crawl that compares the 18th century reaction to the author’s novel with Beatlemania, the better to whet your appetite for the story that follows.

Said story is love-at-first-sight, as experienced by Werther (Douglas Booth), a man with an iron whim. Werther’s delusional impulses and bad ideas are certified as such by his pessimistically pragmatic best friend Paul (Jaouhar Ben Ayed).

But the notion that Werther has fallen under a magic spell from afar by a random woman he doesn’t even know (Charlotte, played by Alison Pill) suggests that this love is a creation of his own mind.

Maybe it’s a subconscious distraction from the seemingly tedious path he’s on by dint of birth (family connections have him working as a paralegal with assurances of advancement). Werther doesn’t mind torching that position in the course of his ultimate prize. Said prize, by the way, has an amiable fiancé named Albert (Patrick J. Adams), whom Werther finds himself liking.

Chalk it up as just another square peg to stubbornly squeeze into the round hole that is our hero’s fantasy.

Charlotte, it turns out, is Werther’s complete opposite, a selfless caregiver, obliged by family circumstance to act as a mother figure to her five siblings. One of them, Sissy (Iris Apatow) has her own delusions of nabbing Werther for herself.

But there’s something in Werther’s “time for some me-time” sales pitch that appeals to Charlotte, allowing her to let him in as a friend, and later, unwisely, as more.

There is a meanness of spirit to all of this, an uncomfortable awkwardness that seemingly can’t end well.

Not that it ends particularly definitively. It just segues into another chapter in the life of a protagonist I’m not sure even his mother could love.

Young Werther. Written and directed by José Lourenço. Starring Douglas Booth, Alison Pill, Patrick J. Adams. Opens in theatres Friday, January 10.