Total Eclipse

“Dogs are all liberals” – Rimbaud

“He [Rimbaud] was my great and radiant sin” – Verlaine

“I’m faithful to all my loves, because once I love them, I will always love them” – Verlaine

“The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable” – Rimbaud

A favorite topic among bibliophiles is what one literary figure might have said to another (see above) had they ever met.  Writers and philosophers living far apart on our history’s spectrum are particularly popular themes, with one writer even gaining eternal renown for a work composed of conversations between famous writers and philosophers that reads more like opposing editorials.  Other students of literature like to spend an inordinate amount of time imagining the private lives of the writers they admire.  For them, the being of a famous writer cannot emerge solely from his works as a rosebush may not live without its thorns, topsoil, or weeds.  It is not enough that we must subject great works upon their copyright’s expiration to editorial whims, we must also find new and silly ways to enter the lives of people whom we could not know and whose legacy is a pile of books that we often cannot bring ourselves to read attentively.  We must understand them as people first and writers later.  If how they talked, how they ate, and how they showed each other affection are more important than their literary production, so be it.  Their legacies will be forever tainted and we share only part of the blame.  Which brings us to this fine film about two legendary French poets, Paul Verlaine (David Thewlis) and Arthur Rimbaud (Leonardo DiCaprio).

The year, we are told, is 1871.  Germany unites into the most powerful state Continental Europe has seen since the Romans; Verlaine is twenty-seven but already fading in poetic authority (poets then were like tennis stars now, washed up at thirty); Rimbaud is ten years his junior and the most phenomenal of Wunderkinder.  This is not a love story, or at least not one in which there is any tenderness or caring.  A poet of genius in his own right if more a product of his era, Verlaine cannot do much more than get viciously intoxicated, vent on his ugly but very rich wife, and gaze at the beautiful lad who keeps asking him for small favor after small favor.  He loves Rimbaud as a younger, more gifted version of himself, one unafraid to challenge society’s mores.  Nevertheless, it is remarkable how humdrum Rimbaud’s notions of novelty seem, and how consistently a man of such talent is portrayed as a boor and a bully.  The two while away their time in absinthe bars (roughly a barrel gets consumed during the film), smoking, flirting, and obviously planning something that will ruin both of their lives.  They shift and totter between hatred and symbiotic need, and finally separate once Verlaine, in his umpteenth booze-ridden fit, decides to play William Tell with dear Arthur, who of course has too little respect for Verlaine’s promises to pay his threats any attention.  Verlaine is arrested, charged with being a sodomite, and jailed for two years.  He is released having served his full sentence and become a devout Catholic.  And at this point, Rimbaud is far away in both body and spirit.

One might suppose that the whole endeavor would sink into melodrama in a gooey, nauseating way.  Yet a certain dignity obtains throughout.  And whatever our knowledge of the times and, more importantly, of the poetic oeuvres of the two men, we are compelled to watch even if nothing really happens.  Did what is depicted really take place?  Should we alter our impressions of the oeuvres of the two artists accordingly?  A more celebrated film employs the same technique of portraying a young ingénue as a sort of rock star, the difference being that Rimbaud’s upstart irreverence curiously resembles the ignorant kitsch of Soviet and hippie manifestos.  Amadeus was a rock star, insofar as he was worshiped as a celebrity who could do no wrong upon the stage.  Methinks the problem lies with the fiction, not the reality.  I am duly aware that the intent of the film was to be authentic and that the happenings portrayed have their basis in the correspondence between the poets.  Even so, the characters, especially Rimbaud, are too one-sided, evincing modern cinema’s endemic aversion to subtlety.  The deep and recurrent problem with such recreations, as in so many historical novels, is that the literary revivalist has no inkling of the inner lives of the artistic creatures he re-imagines because he has little relationship to their work, where their true biography is found.  The result is that extraordinary persons are obliged to be understood in our terms, not theirs, and live out the plainest of soap opera ditherings. 

That being said, Thewlis and DiCaprio are marvelously cast in terms of looks and gestures.  Yet time and again they are superceded by Rimbaud's bohemian vulgarities which, as could be expected, devolve into ridiculous showmanship.  By many indications, Rimbaud was mild-mannered (some sources do portray him as the prototypical enfant terrible), if impetuous and all too ready to enthrall people with his genius.  The Rimbaud of Total Eclipse is only obnoxious, only self-absorbed, only prone to immediate gratification like all of the young and the guileful.  Verlaine, on the other hand, is without exception a sniveling, pathetic meatball of middle-age insecurities battling issues of sexual identity and creative choices.  But you cannot be a great poet if you are completely and utterly immoral.  The on-screen Rimbaud hasn’t a redeeming quality about him and temporizes awkwardly whenever asked to express any of his verse.  Such does not a poet make.  In the end, Rimbaud comes off acting his age – although his compositions are of an artist of much broader experience – with the manipulative properties of a pretty woman rather than a man of letters (most evident in his lament that he has never seen the sea).  Come to think of it, perhaps that might not be terribly distant from the truth.

The Count of Monte Cristo

The moral law within us is certain — as we are as well in our stronger moments — that there exist no benefits to revenge.  What do we learn from harboring resentment and spite?  What good does it serve to inflict upon others what we or our loved ones have suffered?  We may lead decent, unfettered lives with nary an affront, and yet this old debate continues to burn as our petty justification of redemption.  Now redemption is a great thing.  Justice for all is what we all seek in one way or another, and its fairness not only makes being moral worthwhile, it also removes all other approaches to reality.  For all the cruelty and evil perpetrated in the world, there will always be hope for those who want justice for others as much as they want it (most naturally) for themselves.  We know that a true artist’s sincerest wish is the chance to fulfill his potential, a magnanimity that he extends to every downtrodden and miserable wretch in his vicinity.  This is why the artist, perhaps the most pacific of all souls, enacts in his mind a violent revenge upon the responsible, searing them with his thoughts and banishing them to eternal cognition of their wickedness.  And if you know anything about the literature of revenge, you know the name of Edmond Dantès.

The story is one of the classics, remade into plays, films, and rewritten as the thinly−veiled plot of more recent books.  And like all such tales, its longevity can be attributed to its fundamental moral: the meek shall triumph over the blasphemous and inherit the earth.  Or in this case, a large trove of loot buried in the earth.  As it would do us little good to review the original book, a melodramatic farrago at times both charming and schmaltzy (the sure sign of a serial), we should instead turn to the most recent film adaptation.  Dantès (James Caviezel) is an illiterate French sailor in the year eighteen−fourteen, as is his chum Fernand Mondego (Guy Pearce).  Students of language will immediately note that Mondego contains the French word for “world,” while Dantès reminds us of some lesser realm.  More perspicacious readers will see a bizarre homogeneity in the fact that the first syllable of each surname contains the last syllable of the other’s first name.  To be sure, the men are mirror images, but they are also two parts of the same soul, a device mentioned earlier with regard to this book.  Mondego is so irrevocably evil and unscrupulous that no God or gremlin could hope to rescue him from speeding doom.  And Dantès, who will rise from lowliest pauper to holiest prince, has much of the avenging angel in him, vigilantism which we are supposed to cheer on like the triumphant Jacobin trains.  In this world there is no grey, no off−white, no mauve, no lilac, no azure.  Only black, white, and the red of Dantès’s flesh as he is whipped every year on the anniversary of his incarceration.

There is more to this, of course.  We have the requisite female (Dagmara Dominczyk) who loves one man but marries the other; the dying priest who cannot understand how to burrow out of a prison but knows the secret of El Dorado itself; the maniacal jailer who enjoys thrashing his wards and cackling; the disappointed father who does something particularly desperate when Edmond is convicted; the corrupt official who barefacedly ignores one man’s innocence in favor of his career; and the ingenuous teenage son who seems to remind us of someone else.  I vaguely recollect some ridiculous attempt at symbolism involving a chess piece and a quip about all of us being either kings or pawns, but that’s for those viewers who think historical figures become historical by uttering such rot.  Yet, despite its predictability (you will guess each intrigue one scene before it occurs), the film is a rousing, swashbuckling pleasure.  Dantès’s redemption is as pure as the wanton betrayal of his friend Mondego, played with sadistic relish by Pearce in what must be considered the performance of his career.  We also remember that the motto of the film, conveniently painted in bold on the wall of Dantès’s cell, is God will give me justice.  And if He doesn’t, snarls Dantès, I might just take it myself.

The Sacrifice

Apart from being the beloved country of this recently deceased director whose heyday coincided with Europe’s postwar rebirth, Sweden is undoubtedly one of the least plausible locations you might imagine involved in a cataclysm of the type only possible the last sixty-odd years.  Bergman’s untouchability has been questioned the last two decades or so, but such impertinence is common to every wave of clammy-handed critics who seek to deify their contemporaries and cast out the old masters.  When you consider that the ghosts of Milton, Bach, and Melville all labored at one point or another in obscurity in favor of talentless hacks whose names are long forgotten, Bergman’s waning authority is not surprising.  Soon enough, however, he will be restored to power because he is a genius of this newest art of ours, the moving picture.  And this film, shot with some of Bergman’s habitual actors and crew and on the Swedish island he so adored, is a monumental tribute to Bergman by the greatest cinematic artist the world has ever seen.

We begin the film in Gotland, land of God or good, an island away from the Swedish mainland, a small sanctuary amidst the torrents of chaos, war, and materialism.  There Alexander (Erland Josephson), a family patriarch and man of no faith, lives with his family, including his English wife Adelaide and their mute six-year-old son.  Alexander’s days are quiet ones, very distant from the storm of his younger years in which he was an actor, psychologist, and something of a philosopher.  The postman comes with a telegram that allows Alexander to digress into the usual existential poppycock about the fate of man (no one is supposed to be impressed with the casual mention of profound topics except perhaps Alexander himself).  Civilization, he muses, has no real meaning, and it is fruitless even to discuss that some higher power has given us the privilege of life.  It is in this context, at a family dinner to which the postman is invited, that the unthinkable occurs: a short, earthquake-like scene is followed by an emergency announcement from the television. This is the worst kind of announcement; the announcement no one ever, ever hopes to hear or consider; the announcement that for a while during the height of the Cold War seemed less of a fantasy than at any other time; the announcement that makes Alexander do something he has never done or wanted to do.  And at the end of this strange session which he seals with a promise, Alexander wakes up, cold and wretched.  But the world he sees does not reflect his misery in the way he thought it might.

There are myriad interpretations as to why Alexander makes such a choice, why his house erupts in flames (in one of the greatest scenes in all of cinema), and why his son, in the end, finally speaks.  Perhaps the most satisfying approach would be to ask oneself what Bergman and Tarkovsky have in common.  Both are Northern Europeans, aesthetes of the finest caliber, untraditional if devout in their spirituality, and committed to demolishing the falsehoods of trend, movement, and theory that throughout the course of human history have tried and failed to reduce us to amœbæ.  Man is first and foremost a spiritual being, a soul caged in a brittle box.  What else he makes of himself is often dictated by vanity, hedonism, or cruel circumstance.  The aging Alexander, who has always been vain and hedonistic, cannot fathom for the longest time why anyone should care about what we can’t see, or those billions of people we cannot meet, or the ecumenical and moral responsibility we have to preserve ourselves in the face of extinction and lesser plagues.  Hopeless man does not even deserve my pity, he assures himself.  Then he grasps at a thread – a large, branched thread that he plants on his birthday – tries to follow its path against the almighty sun, and comes across something else.  His beginning is his end, so to speak.  Or something greater than both.

Reconstruction

Each of us privileged enough to learn about the world from books and absorb it in travel has a special idealized place that persists, regardless of our heritage or life’s discourse, as the realest of worlds and our true home.  For Milton, it was a Homeric Greece everliving and everlasting; for Nabokov, the country estate of the progressive Russia of his adolescence; for Melville, it was the ocean itself, the sensation of movement free from the hum of men.  And it is to this place that each person who lives to write will turn for inspiration, because that place, however sentimentalized and flawless, remains throughout his life the endless font for his pen.  You may ask, and quite rightly, whether it is healthy to escape to realms of pure delight.  There are certainly abuses of this Elysium, and you will find them among the most abstract and pitiless writers (anonymous and cowled amidst these positive pages) who reject life’s plenitude in favor of an illusory paradise.  That is hardly the point.  Without ideals, without some brazen image of beneficence and beatitude, we are shells with the flesh of apes doomed to evolve only as much as chemistry permits.  To survive we must be redeemed by the grandeur of life, indeed a luxury for the majority of our fit species, and pursue it with full sail.  And if you have ever been to Scandinavia, especially to Copenhagen, you may understand the light that engilds my horizon when I think myself there.  Such is the fate of Alex David (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), the protagonist of this marvelous film.

Alex is a fortunate young man, and not only because he lives and breathes in Europe’s most beautiful city.  He is young, handsome, unpretentious, a successful photographer if a bit scruffy around the edges, and every night after snapping away to his heart’s content, the beneficiary of a fine apartment and an even finer girlfriend Simone (the lovely Marie Bonnevie).  In fact, just by being himself Alex provokes the envy of any older man, even one whose youth was filled with all the riches of modern European existence: artistic and political freedom, a life in a prosperous postwar city in the throes of an economic miracle, the deep inhale of a cigarette, the mouthful of the strongest liquor, and the exploration of every inch of a beautiful woman’s world.  Who would not want to trade places with Alex and relive our one youth, given to persons and places we often must leave behind?  What older man with a substantially younger wife would not fear Alex, his studied lassitude, his carefully groomed stubble, and that most seductive of professions, photography, through which any woman can gain immortality?  Yes, he has all the characteristics of a wife-stealer.  Which is precisely what esteemed Swedish novelist August Holm (Krister Henriksson) decides to make out of him.

We meet Holm, a solemn aesthete in his late fifties, and his stunning thirtyish wife Aimee (also played by Bonnevie) as they come to a posh Copenhagen hotel for the night.  Holm is to speak at some conference about his novels and compose, as he always does, while ignoring his immediate vicinity.  Accustomed to the role of second fiddle despite Holm’s obvious tender devotion, Aimee is left to find something to do with her evening.  What she finds is Alex, who understands their meeting as fate, follows her to her hotel room, and allows sensuality to take its course.  The next morning he awakens to find his life changed: Aimee is not around, his apartment is no longer his, and no one (including Simone) from his previous life seems to recognize him.  By entering Aimee’s world, he has lost his own; soon enough we become aware that Holm, whose soft, lush voiceover mocks the adultery it narrates, is pulling more than one string.  And Alex and Aimee, or maybe Simone in an alternative reality, have no option but to play along if they wish their love, which is indeed what both have waited for all their years to experience, to survive.

One reviewer was erudite enough to compare this tale to this ancient legend, which is a fair estimation of a modernized fable.  It is true Orpheus and Alex are both caught between two worlds, but only Alex is victimized by a lack of information and in love with two women (who are obviously the same actress, although the audience is left to wonder why they might resemble each other).  Orpheus knew the unusual conditions of his agreement and violated them absentmindedly; Alex has consented to nothing and cannot fathom why and how his life could have changed overnight.  Yet it was worth it because his love for Aimee is worth it.  Even if neither one were to exist outside the mind of their creator.

Reversal of Fortune

You may be surprised to learn of the details of this crime, which has maintained its dual status of “unsolved” and “perhaps never occurred” for almost thirty years.  Rhode Island, 1980: we find ourselves among the well−to−do and deep of pocket and their world of disposability.  A relatively impecunious European nobleman called Claus von Bülow (whose cousin was a contemporary of this composer) has been married for fourteen years to Martha “Sunny” Crawford, an American heiress who also happens to be hyperglycemic.  By all indications, Claus seems to be no better or worse than his ilk, being interested in a comfortable career whose salary makes no difference to his well−being, the society of a select few, a large estate with all the amenities, and a modicum of respect from those who watch him with envy as he waltzes into a small store to purchase tobacco.  A graduate of the same college attended by Dryden, Marvell, and Nabokov, he tried his hand at law before his marriage but now feels restrained by his dear wife, their daughter (named after the woman who would marry both Claus’s cousin and Wagner himself), and Sunny’s two children from her previous marriage to another Germanic gentleman of title.  So, we are told yet again, Claus allegedly does what any good reader of murder mysteries would do: kill by using the person’s weakness against her.  Had Sunny been an avid skier, she would have met her frozen fate on a slope.  Owing to her blood sugar level, however, the weapon can only be one: insulin.

But Sunny does not die.  She still lies unconscious in the vegetative state induced by the insulin injected into her on December 21, 1980.*  As the person with the greatest motive and access, Claus is immediately fingered as the guilty party and brought to trial, resulting in a thirty−year sentence for attempted murder.  That von Bülow would seek to appeal the decision is hardly surprising; that he would turn to Alan Dershowitz, a Jewish lawyer from Harvard Law School, to do so, still seems a bit odd.  A self−made man, phenomenally successful law professor and civil rights attorney, and one of the state of Israel’s greatest supporters, Dershowitz initially wants nothing to do with this silver−spooned Dano−German snob whose family might have harbored more than a little tenderness for certain unwholesome forces in the 1930s and 1940s.  Nevertheless, maybe because von Bülow is so utterly convinced of his innocence, or maybe because no one else will take him on, Dershowitz consents to defend someone for whom he admittedly hasn’t a shred of sympathy.  The result is a book, as well as an absolutely marvelous film.

We meet a number of colorful characters, from prosecuting attorneys to spoiled European teenagers to a whole houseful of Harvard law students, but only three will ultimately give the film its shape: Dershowitz (the late Ron Silver), Sunny (Glenn Close), and Claus (an Oscar−winning Jeremy Irons).  Pictures of the original Sunny, an attractive, sprightly young thing, make you wonder whether the somewhat plain Close reflects director Barbet Schroeder's views on Claus’s guilt.  So too does Sunny herself, however accurately portrayed as a hypochondriac drunk whose moods alternate between belligerence, apathy, and self−loathing.  This is, in any case, the side of her that Claus wishes us and his lawyer to see.  Claus is not concerned with anything except maintaining his life as it is, free and unperturbed, and without any blot on his reputation among the few people who actually still talk to him.  His exchanges with Dershowitz, a man he looks down upon simply because he lives for his work (and even finds it more enthralling than Claus’s conversation), are superb in keeping with the personalities of the characters presented.  There can be no accord or understanding between these two worlds, only a joining of forces in the name of justice.

In this regard, Irons, who possesses an innate ability to play aristocratic pariahs, could not be better cast.  And while I cannot take credit for one reviewer’s marvelous description of his smoking posture as that of hailing a taxi, I will say that what von Bülow has on his side is poise.  There is nothing, not one hair or button that evinces the slightest sign of fear.  Indignation in the hands of the wealthy and influential is one of the oldest and filthiest tactics, but Claus does not play that card, either.  He limits himself to the facts, as well as to the very logical supposition that he could have been framed by a large number of people, and does not seem to be in a hurry to get acquitted.  As the film progresses, Claus becomes its metronome, speeding it up when he gets excited (especially when he says his wife’s name in utter contempt), and slowing it down when opinions converge against him.  Since the whole story is based on true events, calling some of the details unlikely would be rather impish on my part, so I will refrain.  But what cannot be denied is Claus’s charm.  He is smooth, welcoming, and genuine about his innocence and the state of his horrendous marriage.  Even if he is the only one who really believes all that.

*Note: Sunny von Bülow, still in a vegetative state, succumbed to cardiopulmonary arrest on December 6, 2008.