Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is the most celebrated German poet of all-time, a polymath, a biologist and even a theoretical physicist. But in the new film “Young Goethe in Love,” opening Friday at the Coral Gables Art Cinema, he is none of those things, not yet. Played by Alexander Fehling, Goethe is an uninspired law clerk prone to bouts of inebriated revelry, constantly committing fashion faux pas, fumbling through doctorate examinations, tripping over himself and generally acting like the hapless protagonist in a Seth Rogen comedy. Because we know what Goethe will become, the humor in his character is predicated entirely on our knowledge of his future greatness, allowing the audience to laugh at his misfortunes with smug awareness and empathize with his plight with the kind of audience-to-legend “relatability” that permeates so many biopics (“Even Goethe had hangovers and pined for girls he couldn’t have!”).
Indeed, lazy irony is one of this movie’s stocks in trade, the other being its atmosphere of Art-house for Adolescences: It’s an 18th century story about a great writer’s intellectual origins in a time of German Romanticism, but it comes off like the extended pilot of a contemporary WB series, with occasional bouts of melancholy suffusing a precious, dewy-eyed, hysterically fatalistic emo-romance (The difference is that these days, Goethe would be tweeting his suffering in 140 characters, not writing “The Sorrows of Young Werther”).
The object of Goethe’s affection is Lotte Buff (Miriam Stein), a big-haired damsel in an extended family. Her father is trying to marry her off to Albert (Moritz Bleibtreu), a wealthy, fusty and predictably boring attorney who just happens to be young Goethe’s supervisor. For Lotte, there’s no choice here, really – Goethe is a mysterious charmer, laced with 21stcentury ennui, who can’t seem to fit into his stodgy peruke, whereas Albert is, well … an 18thcentury lame-o whose lawyerly wig fits just fine.
Goethe and Lotte fall in love clandestinely and cinematically. From the spilling of a glass of wine at a social gathering to running into each other after each has tried to visit the other simultaneously, all of their encounters are nauseating meet-cutes that only the youngest among us – and perhaps readers of romance paperbacks – will find charming. What’s most certain is that, underneath all of its courtship pageantry and lovingly rendered bucolic sets, “Young Goethe in Love” has absolutely nothing to say about Wetzlar in the 1770s. It’s too busy trying to look like today.
