“He’s handsome, isn’t he?” a pair of women say to each other. When Martin Eden walks down streets, women and men stop smoking, folding clothes, breathing. Director Pietro Marcello (Lost and Beautiful) cast the right actor to play Jack London’s eponymous character: as Martin, Luca Marinelli is, as they used to say in Looney Tunes, one big hunk of man. When Marcello captures him peaking furtively round a corner at Elena (Jessica Cressy), he’s a stunning camera object; with his geosphere-sized eyes and broad shoulders, he’s a cross between Jake Gyllenhaal and Green Gartside, with lousier teeth.
Emphasizing Marinelli’s looks with high angles and extreme close-ups, Marcello wants the audience to understand how London’s autodidact uses his poetic ambitions and charisma to discover his inner fascist. It’s not clear when Martin Eden takes place, thanks to the director’s interweaving of documentary footage of crowds and trains and dressing actors in a mix of early twentieth century and contemporary clothing. A contempt for people under the guise of acting on their behalf is a trick always in style, the film suggests.
But in the first half of Martin Eden, our hero defends the innocent, reads Baudelaire, courts a young woman, and sweeps back a head of lustrous hair with water. At first he works as a sailor, and it’s obvious he finds no poetry at sea commensurate with his soul yearnings. The innocent he defends on land is the brother of Elena Orsini (Jessica Cressy), a forthright but conventional product of the bourgeoisie. Within minutes the audience senses she’s not enough for Martin, but his ambition requires an audience as supine as hers. Her family is less so. “You’re very likable, Mr. Eden,” Elena’s mother observes without the slightest intention of making him an in-law. Certainly at home he has no audience: motivated by jealousy as much as ignorance, his father can’t wait for a humbled Martin to know his place. A sympathetic landlady, perhaps as smitten as the rest of us, takes him in. With the help of a typewriter he pounds away at stories and poems; he churns them out as quickly as he earns rejection letters.
Writers need mentors, or at least writers in movies; Martin gets one in Russ Brissenden (Carlo Cecchi). Alcoholic, loquacious, and grizzled, Brissenden persuades his charge to take a closer look at socialist politics. This is when the archival footage of anarchist Errico Malatesta has its non-diegetic influence on the narrative: the cinematic equivalent of London’s didactic passages. Like the novel, Martin Eden treats subtlety as if it were a political enemy, which works to its advantage for a while. When Martin’s speeches start reflecting his mangled notions about supermen, the film turns into a blockhead’s The Conformist without Bernardo Bertolucci’s command of camera movement as dialectical interrogation. By contrast, Marcello’s increased reliance on closeups is a kind of lamentation: why did this palooka turn bad? In Martin Eden‘s last shot, our hero is out to sea, no looking back at the rest of us, ourselves lamenting what we’ll never see again.
GRADE: B
Humanizing The Vacuum 
