Jack London’s 1909 novel Martin Eden tells the story of a working-class Oakland sailor, based in large part on London himself, who embarks on a journey of self-education and literary ambition in order to prove himself worthy of the love of a wealthy woman. He succeeds, but at great cost: His will to power and creative vision end up alienating him from the proletariat and its socialist politics, which he comes to view in Nietzschean terms as a form of “slave morality.” Yet by the time he achieves literary stardom, years of poverty and humiliation have embittered him against the bourgeoisie, including the bourgeois woman he once loved. Rich but miserable, contemptuous of his fans and critics alike, and seemingly trapped within the mental prison of a worldview that exalts individual genius above all else, Martin ends by drowning himself, returning to the sea from whence he came.
The Italian director Pietro Marcello’s new film adaptation of Martin Eden, now available for streaming on the Kino Lorber website, transposes the action from early 20th-century Oakland to an ambiguously midcentury Naples, Italy. The film opens with a rich but haggard Martin (played with impressive intensity by Luca Marinelli), well-dressed, eyes sunken and a little crazy, dictating into a tape recorder: “The world is stronger than me. Against its power, I have nothing but myself, which, in any case, is quite something.” This, we are immediately informed, is a man who has had to claw his way up in the world and who may have been broken by the act of making it. Then we flash back to the past, when the plot begins in earnest. Martin, a quiet and pensive young sailor, rescues a drunken rich son, Arturo Orsini, from the clutches of an overeager port security guard. As an expression of gratitude, the Orsinis invite Martin to dinner at their estate, where he meets their beautiful and cultivated daughter, Elena (Jessica Cressy). Immediately smitten, he begins to devour literature in order to impress her. As Elena starts to return his affection, Martin hatches a plan to win the approval of her family: He will become a famous writer.
What follows is in many ways a standard kunstlerroman: Martin struggles, for what feels like an eternity on-screen, to get one of his short stories accepted by a magazine. He moves to the countryside to save on rent, he falls behind on his bills, he becomes sick from overexertion, and he listens to his fellow proletarians scoff at his useless literary ambitions while enduring the not-so-subtle snobbery of the Orsinis, by now his prospective in-laws. He is briefly elated when he finally sells his first story, but his happiness is soon punctured by his friend Russ Brissenden (Carlo Cecchi), an aging poet who predicts that Martin’s engagement will fall apart and advises him to return to sea and devote himself to socialism. Russ’s prediction about Elena comes true, but Martin ignores his political counsel. Instead, he loses himself in sensuality and sinks further and further into the persona of the Nietzschean overman, the “blonde beast” whom he praises in one of his tirades against liberalism.
Visually, Martin Eden is beautiful. Shot in a grainy 16 mm that recalls the great French and Italian art-cinema of the 1960s and ’70s, the film treats viewers to a colorful cross section of Neapolitan society, high and low: the cramped squalor of the slums, the grime of the ports and foundries where the workers earn their pay, the beautiful Italian countryside, and the elegant if stifling homes and gardens of the wealthy. And Marinelli is a captivating lead man, expertly expressing Martin’s street brawler-cum-intellectual persona.
But for all its style, Martin Eden has the feel of a film that doesn’t know what it wants to say. London was a socialist and intended his novel as a critique of how individualism could sink into fascism; by stuffing it full of details from his own life (Martin, like London, hones his writing by studying the social Darwinist philosopher Herbert Spencer’s The Philosophy of Style), he presented the political evolution and eventual psychological disintegration of its protagonist as a sort of “there but for the grace of God go I” parable, with the saving grace, in his instance, being socialism.
Marcello seems similarly interested in the appeal of fascism to certain creative types — we get a glimpse of Italy’s blackshirts near the end of the film, implied to represent the logical endpoint of Martin’s ideas — but the film’s setting works against its message. Martin Eden doesn’t exist in any specific time period: The clothes, cars, TVs, and music all suggest something in the 1960s or ’70s, but the main political and intellectual currents are all interwar, and there are frequent references to a coming war that one can only assume is World War II. This confused setting turns into a plot problem. London couldn’t have known for a fact in 1909 that socialism would lead to a new sort of tyranny, but modern viewers can, and so when Martin makes precisely this point to a group of socialist workers, it’s unclear how we’re supposed to take it. Yes, of course, fascism is bad, but isn’t Martin basically right here? And without socialism to play the role of the saving grace that could plausibly rescue Martin from his alienation, what are we left with? The banal observation that unhappy people can go down strange political roads or that egotists gravitate toward ideologies that glorify egotism. Those are fine points to make, but I’m not sure you need 2 hours and 9 minutes to make them.
Park MacDougald is Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner Magazine.
