Young Goethe in Love

Germany 1772 - the young and tumultuous Johann Goethe (Alexander Fehling) aspires to be a poet but after failing his law exams, is sent by his father (Henry Huebchen) to a sleepy provincial court to mend his ways. At first, he tries to do his best and wins the praise and friendship of his superior Kestner (Moritz Bleibtreu). But then Lotte (Miriam Stein) enters his life and nothing is the same as before. However, Johann is unaware that Lotte is in fact already promised by her father (Burghart Klaußner) to Kestner. The dramatic and unfulfilled love between the poet and Lotte was the template for his masterpiece "The Sorrows of Young Werther." -- (C) Music Box

In 1772, we find the young German poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe flunking out of law school and getting drunk with his friends. He's a free spirit trapped in a stringent world where class is everything. All Goethe wants to do is write poems and get them published. But his stern father sends him away to a small town where he is accepted to work at a provincial law firm. There he befriends fellow law student Wilhelm Jerusalem. Goethe also meets, and falls in love with, the beautiful Lotte Buff. She in turn falls for the hopelessly romantic Goethe but, unbeknownst to him, is promised to marry Albert Kestner, Goethe's superior at the law firm.

It all adds up to anguished love, as his friend Jerusalem also suffers a failed love affair with a married woman. Goethe transforms their travails into a grand masterpiece, the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.

At first glace, Young Goethe in Love seems like Germany's version of Shakespeare in Love. The parallels of the two poets and their literary works of genius are certainly there. But where Shakespeare in Love was drawn from a largely fictitious take on how the Bard came to write Romeo & Juliet, Young Goethe portrays mostly real events in the German poet's early life that inspired him to write his breakthrough novel.

Young Goethe delivers a satisfying story worthy of other great romantic romps, and Alexander Fehling (Inglourious Basterds) puts on a magnetic and charming performance as Goethe.

Hunter S. Thompson, the godfather of Gonzo journalism, would seem to have little in common with Johann Goethe, the polymathic superstar of German Romanticism. How curious, then, that the recent movies based on their lives should be so similar. Like “The Rum Diary,” which opened last week, “Young Goethe in Love” tells the story of a fledgling writer who endures a crummy job with an unfriendly boss, falls in love with another man’s fiancée and spends a lot of time drinking and carousing and a little time in jail on his way to literary greatness.

Coincidence? Cliché? A bit of both, really. Writers’ lives are notoriously difficult to dramatize in a visual medium, even when the act of writing itself is conducted by means of a charmingly obsolete technology, like Goethe’s furiously scratching pens or Thompson’s clattery typewriter. Perhaps to compensate for the tedium of composition and the ambiguity of their motives, literary figures on film are depicted as living strenuous, even strident, lives full of incident and feeling.

Certainly this is the case with “Young Goethe in Love,” directed by Philipp Stölzl and released in Germany with the title “Goethe!” (Gesundheit!). The exclamation point sums up the film’s approach, which is chaotic, emphatic and sometimes enjoyably silly. Set in the 18th century, when people wore wigs and knee breeches and laughed loud and long at the slightest pretext, the movie proposes an almost literal correspondence between its subject’s life and his breakthrough work, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” a best seller that prompted a vogue among the impressionable youth of Europe for blue coats and lovesick suicides.