LGM Film Club, Part 304: Martin Eden

One of the best reviewed films of 2020 was Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden, an adaptation of the Jack London story about a working class guy who tries to better himself in order to marry a rich woman but who ends up betraying his working class identity while never being accepted the rich either. At the time, London was frustrated by the reviews missing the point. London intended it as a critique of individualism but it was largely celebrated as a story about American individualism. Like Upton Sinclair with The Jungle, London was frustrated that people missed the political point.

Well, this should be a good topic for a film. But despite the reviews, I found this film absolutely flat, just an empty shell. Reading the positive reviews, so many mentioned it reminded them of a Visconti film and I think it was nostalgia for the beautiful Italian films of the past that drove a lot of the positivity. In other words, nostalgia. Because the film itself just misses every mark. The scene is moved to Italy, which is fine, the story can basically work anywhere. However, Martin Eden is not developed as a working class character at all. He just works on a ship at the beginning of the film and then immediately the plot is started as he saves the son of a family from a beating on the docks, is repaid by visiting the family home, and falls in love with the daughter, who is interested but also knows this guy is uneducated. So the film follows the basic plot of the story, which means it never takes time to develop the internal character of Eden. He gets his education, he becomes a famous author on the glories of the individual, he gets rich, he betrays his class background, he’s still not accepted, he’s unhappy, he starts doing cocaine in wild parties (nice touch actually), everything falls apart for him. But that’s all it is–a shell. There’s nothing inside of it.

The one interesting film the thing does is center the toxicity of Herbert Spencer, who becomes Eden’s hero and intellectual inspiration. We rarely talk about Spencer today, at least not in public culture, though his toxic racist individualism still defines much about twenty-first century life. Marcello could have avoided that and he didn’t. But otherwise, it’s a pretty boring film, despite all the reviews. I suppose it’s a leftist film but like all art, it has to be good art first. The art is a lot more important than the politics, unless we are talking agitprop, which this is very much not.