On nearly every page of Jack London’s thoroughly gripping 1909 novel, Martin Eden fights with himself and the forces around him. For the young sailor, the world isn’t so much a stage as it is a boxing match: brutal, raw, gritty.
After discovering the insatiable world of ideas and books, Martin tries desperately to transform himself from a penniless, rough-hewn, bottom-rung laborer into a specimen of intellectual brilliance. He wants to drink from the sea of knowledge, and he wants to be a writer. If only it were so easy.
Despite being one of London’s greatest works, Martin Eden is not well known like White Fang or The Call of the Wild. Likewise, but much less importantly, it’s been neglected on the screen. Unlike London’s two aforementioned novels, Martin Eden has scarcely been adapted for film. It was made into a movie in 1914 and 1942, then not again until 2019 and 2020.
One naturally feels some excitement, then, in watching Pietro Marcello’s 2019 adaptation of Martin Eden. Like London’s novel, the movie is a heady and visceral drama of romance, ambition, ideas, and politics. And aside from some name changes and the swapping out California for Italy, Marcello never meanders far from the narrative and spirit of the book.
Martin Eden is played by Luca Marinelli, who is well cast for the role, looking brawny, strong, and street-wise, yet also charismatic and even playful. In so many ways, Martin Eden is an beguiling amalgam of traits (which might partly explain why viewers are likely both to root for and loathe Mr. Eden at various points in the film).
We first get to know Martin as he enters the house of a young man named Arturo, whom Martin has just saved from a further walloping by a security guard on the docks. Wanting to thank him, Arturo brings him to his family’s house for lunch. Inside the opulent upper-class Orsini home, Martin enters a world of refinement and sparkling conversation.
He also discovers Arturo’s sister, Elena. Elegant, privileged, and a student in college, she’s entirely unlike the cast of girls in Martin’s past. The two speak their first words to each other after she sees Martin in the family library, staring at a painting. “From a distance it’s beautiful,” he remarks to her, “but close-up you only see stains.”
He goes on to tell her that he’d just been flipping through a book of poems by Baudelaire. He’s clueless about the poet—and literature, in general—but touched by what he’s read. Baudelaire is a bold poet, she informs him. Later, as she plays the piano in front of her family, Martin watches longingly. Who is this beautiful being from a world utterly unlike his own?
By the time Martin leaves the Orsini home, he’s as giddy as can be; an easy smile graces his face as he jauntily walks back to the house of his sister and ill-tempered brother-in-law, with whom he lives.
As the weeks and months go on, two things drive every waking minute of Martin’s life: the pursuit of knowledge and becoming a writer, and the developing passion between him and Elena. She’s many things to him: his love object, his muse, his channel into a different way of being. I want to “Speak like you, think like you,” he tells her.
And so, with her as guide, he becomes her pupil. He studies the grammar books she gives him, seeks her advice (some of which he follows, some of which he adamantly does not), and uses every chance he has with her to speak about his progress.
But the more he studies, writes, and thinks for himself, the more he feels a chasm opening up between him in the world. There’s also his ever-constant struggle for money. But rather than return to the grueling, mindless labor which has been a part of his life since the age of eleven, he works only when he absolutely must; his writing, he believes, will be his ticket to success.
The writing profession, of course, is no gateway to a land of financial security. Martin seems to both know and not know this. He sends out scores of his manuscripts, expecting checks to come—even if only small ones at first—but the publishers don’t bite. It’s a grind. And as the grind goes on, Martin’s life becomes ever more volatile.
His increasingly voracious thirst for knowledge—he’s infatuated above all by the evolutionary ideas of Herbert Spencer—along with his headstrong desire to become a famous writer, turn him into someone he never could have predicted at the beginning of his quest for enlightenment.
Watching the second half of the film, I was reminded of Vincent Cassel’s portrayal of Paul Gauguin in a biopic of the French painter. In that movie, Gauguin, like Martin Eden in this one, is a human being overloaded with thoughts and feelings and social and artistic ideas. Some insightful and understandable, others delusional and misanthropic.
Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden is a fun experience, and even more interesting when you keep in mind that Jack London’s story is partly autobiographical.
Spectatio 