Two factors influenced the seafaring and soon-to-be self-educated Martin Eden’s (Luca Marinelli) decision to make the written word his stock in trade: the escape from his proletarian surroundings that it offered, and a shot at impressing Elena (Jessica Cressy), the learned but terminally-dullish sister of a boy he happened to save from a throttling. (In filmmaker Pietro Marcello’s adaptation of the Jack London novel, Elena isn’t a character so much as she is Martin’s perceived purpose, a symbol of his aspiration.) For one hour, we side with Martin, hanging on every poem or story submission that comes back stamped “Return to Sender,” until the day an acceptance letter changes his life and the course of the movie, both for the worse. The vexing hand-held camerawork that dominates the first section eventually settles, but then only long enough for the closeups and debating to kick into high gear: Marcello doesn’t want you to miss a single precious kernel of polemicizing. There are moments that astound — the expressionistic applicability of hand-color/tinted archival footage/film clips to establish place or indicate passage of time outclass anything in Peter Jackson’s labored They Shall Not Grow Old. It isn’t until the arrival of bad news, punctuated by footage of a sinking ship, that the film begins to sink under the weight of its own precosity. Next stop: a foregone conclusion. (2019) — Scott Marks
This movie is not currently in theaters.