Martin Eden

Directed by Pietro Marcello

Running time: 2hr08 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Luca Marinelli in Martin Eden

At one point in Martin Eden, the eponymous hero and his girlfriend Elena go to the cinema, and leave fiercely and hotly divided over the film’s happy ending. Bourgeois sophisticate Elena embraces the hopeful optimism as a model for real life; Martin, a hard-up sailor who has educated himself on Baudelaire and the like, is incensed by what he sees as a lie, a cosy betrayal of life’s truth. Back and forth they argue, receding into polarised stands that pit realism and idealism against each other, as if they’re mutually exclusive. If they’d gone to see Martin Eden, as it happens, they might have met in the middle: Pietro Marcello’s inspired, intellectually nourishing and visually ravishing adaptation of Jack London’s 1909 novel honours life’s hard, concrete realities while permitting its characters, and by extension its audience, room to dream and swoon.   

London’s quintessentially American, ruggedly individualist literature has inspired any number of film adaptations over the last century, many of them romanticised beyond recognition. That it took an Italian documentary-maker, in his first fully narrative feature, to make the most richly and imaginatively interpreted of all London films is just the first of Martin Eden’s many surprises. The book’s tale of a young working-class man striving to crack the literary elite via a relationship with a wealthy woman has been preserved but given a radical makeover in milieu and context, highlighting the enduring relevance of its class warfare.

Though Marcello shifts the narrative from California to Campania, Italy, the film’s period is as restless, ambiguous and in flux as Martin himself: the production and costume design skip across the 20th century with loose abandon, while ravishingly shot drama is interspersed with scruffy archival footage of Neapolitan labourers at work: perhaps Marcello’s documentary roots chime with Martin’s quest for authenticity, though the filmmaker doesn’t share his protagonist’s hostility toward artifice or romance.

For one thing, in Italian star Luca Marinelli, he’s cast a true-blue matinee idol as the tortured hero: in an extraordinary performance that matches brute physicality to soulful interior yearning, he carries the film on square shoulders, while Martin’s inner ideological battles are written in fine creases and twitches across his sculpted face. London’s Martin Eden would baulk at being such a movie star; Marcello’s Martin Eden revels in such contradictions.

MARTIN EDEN (2019) Written by Pietro Marcello, Maurizio Braucci, based on the novel by Jack London | Shot by Francesco Di Giacomo, Alessandro Abate | Edited by Aline Hervé, Fabrizio Federico

In cinemas now.