Stein and Fehling do the ordinary thing in Young Goethe in Love
*** Young Goethe in Love. Written by Alexander Dydyna, Christoph Müller & Philipp Stölzl . Directed by Philipp Stölzl. In German. Available from Netflix.
Though we live in an anti-intellectual age, bio-pics about elite Dead White Males are not quite extinct. The condition is that the emphasis must never be on their genius or any particular ideas they might have espoused. Instead, in films like Amadeus, Immortal Beloved, and Shakespeare in Love we see great minds doing ordinary, non-elite things, such as being young, getting hammered, getting sued, and falling in love. In other words, we like our geniuses to be just like the rest of us—only more so.
In Philipp Stölzl’s Young Goethe in Love, we meet the progenitor of German romanticism, one of the towering polymaths of any age, in his salad days as a legal apprentice. More specifically, we see him being young, getting hammered, and falling in love. How much does this movie want to bring this Ur-genius down to earth? Perhaps allowing for the possibility of a blockbuster Disney musical down the road, its original title was Goethe!
As played here by Alexander Fehling, young Goethe (say Gew-ta) is a good-natured scamp, a law-school washout and a disappointment to his father (Henry Hübchen). Sent to clerk in the backwater town of Wetzlar, Goethe soon finds trouble in the form of a local mädchen (Miriam Stein) whom the script declines to call by her full name—Charlotte—but by the suggestively Bond-girlish “Lotte Buff”. A soloist in the church choir, Lotte has a corresponding artistic temperament, and best of all appreciates Goethe’s brand of poetry, which eschews the classical allusions popular at the time in favor of a certain immediacy of feeling. Trouble is, Goethe’s boss (Moritz Bleibtreu) has also set his powdered wig in Lotte’s direction.
How does it turn out? Goethe’s real Wetzlar misadventures formed the basis of his first literary success, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), an epistolary novel about a young law student driven to despair by love. The book has been credited as the first popular best-seller in the history of modern fiction, and the foundational work of the Romantic movement. It also led to a wave of actual suicides by lovelorn young men in Europe.
Goethe was a heavyweight, but Young Goethe has a pleasant, feather-light feel that is (as one character quips) more Sturm und Drunk than Sturm und Drang. Though the script is full of coincidences and “did I happen to mention?” moments typical of the bodice-and-culottes genre, it boasts strong performances that make it work anyway. There’s real chemistry between Fehling and Stein, whose pairing suggests a young Heath Ledger travelling back two decades to co-star with an emerging Sean Young. The latter looks like she might have stepped out of a Gainsborough painting, yet—charmingly—she doesn’t seem to own a comb. Even Bleibtreu, as Goethe’s plodding bourgeois rival, earns his share of pathos here. The combination of pretty faces, appealing performances, and ravishing production design makes this feel less like a European production than Hollywood at its most entertainingly middlebrow.
The real Goethe went on not only to become a literary lion, but to contribute meaningfully to natural sciences like botany and physics, and play a part in setting the context for Darwin’s insights into evolution. He also loomed large as a cultural influence, both by reputation, by active research in history and folklore, and by his inspiration of musicians like Mozart and Beethoven, and thinkers such as Hegel, Jung, and Nietzche. Nor was his affair with Lotta Buff the be-all and end-all of his romantic career—he had several momentous loves before her, and had an affair later with Christiane Vulpius that, after a brush with death during the Napoleonic Wars, became a long and mutually fulfilling marriage. In short, the months covered in the film is perhaps the least interesting of Goethe’s life and afterlife. But if Goethe! gets us thinking more about of the seminal figures of modernity, then what’s a few tipped tankards and unlaced bodices in the process?
© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro
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