Young Goethe in Love (2010)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

"Goethe!" is a 100-minute movie from Germany directed by Philipp Stölzl and he also came up with the script with 2 other writers. Moritz Bleibtreu may be the biggest star in the cast, but the lead is played by Alexander Fehling, a breakthrough performance for him. Other than these two, there are more actors in here that are known in Germany, such as Klaußner, Hübchen, Bruch and Milberg. My favorite performance, however, comes from Miriam Stein I think, the only major female character and given she has not played in a film of that dimension before, it was delightful to see how good she was, especially in the emotional parts.This 5-year-old film can certainly be classified as a period piece and there is the usual story of love vs. reason for Stein's character. Love would be Goethe, reason is Kestner. This film is as wild as Goethe himself and he and his buddy occasionally reminded me of the two hobbits from "Lord of the Rings". It was great fun to watch them. The film becomes more serious as it goes on, but I never felt it was a tragic watch, even with Goethe not getting the girl he wants. Stölzl also solved this with creativity as the film to me somehow had to end on a high note. And he used Goethe's success as a writer for this. So, everybody was somehow happy. Still, it's always difficult to watch for me and see how love was not the crucial factor in relationships back then. Totally unimaginable today.This was the second time I watched this movie and was at least as good as the first time. Stölzl is slowly moving into Germany's filmmaking elite for me. I did no like "Nordwand", but that had mostly to do with the subject of the film. I loved "The Physician" and now I also like "Goethe!". A pretty talented director and I am certainly curious about his next works. Until then, I recommend "Goethe!". Good performances, a nice story and also real characters (obviously) definitely make this one worth the watch.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, the great German poet and playwright was indeed too young as the story begins. He is a terrible law student in the Frankfurt of the 18th century. Failing to pass the bar exam, he makes a bad impression on the panel that are conducting the oral dissertation. His father, furious with young Johann, decides he must go to another place that will prove not to be as distracting. So young Goethe is dispatched to Wetzlar, an unsophisticated spot, quite a contrast with the city he left behind.At the law firm where Goethe goes to work, he meets another colleague, Wilhelm, who is a kindred spirit who sees in the new arrival a friend. It is Wilhelm who introduces Johann to the local society. Johann falls hard fro the opinionated Lotte, the oldest daughter of an impoverished man. She is the oldest of seven siblings living outside the city. Johann and Wilhelm decide to pay her a visit in which young Goethe falls deeply in love with the charming young woman.Unknown to Johann, Lotte's father sees the opportunity when the occasion arises to accept a marriage proposal for his daughter, when Johann's superior at the law firm sets his eyes on Lotte. The fact causes the young man such distress that drives him to write his sufferings into a manuscript he dedicates to his beloved Lotte, the woman he cannot have. Lotte, reading what Johann wrote in his despair decides it is worth publishing the memoirs, something that surprises Johann on his return to Frankfurt where the book is a best seller.Directed by Philipp Stolzl, the film does not break new ground. It is a glossy account of a period in the life of the young artist whose work is revered as one of the best writers of the German language. The film is light as written for the screen by the director with Christoff Muller and Alexander Dydyna. A young Goethe as depicted in the story was quite a charmer in his dealings with the love he felt for a woman that was not meant to be his. It also conveys the fact that in spite of what his father wanted for him, Johann's mind was better suited for literature than a law career.Alexander Fehling has the good looks demanded for the role of Goethe. Miriam Stein fares much better with her Lotte, an accomplished portrait of the young woman who must help her family that needed her sacrifice. Moritz Bleibtreu is an accomplished actor seen here as Albert Kestner, the man that won Lotte because of his wealth and social standing rather than by getting her love. Volker Bruch is seen as Wilhelm.Our only objection we had in watching the film was the poorly colored subtitles in the version that was shown recently at the Landmark Sunshine that made us strain our eyes to follow the translation.

Even Goethe was young once (yes I know, some things seem completely ridiculous now don't they) and was not the genius we all came to know ... Wait, do we really know him? Actually I wouldn't claim to know him. So we know his work and may like that or not. Think it's great or not. But what do we know about the human behind that? Only way to make the movie more awkward would have been, to show him as a 2-year old (though that would be almost intriguing ... and I might even line up to watch that). As it is, we get to see him, as we have not seen him before. So the filmmakers have the freedom to show a human side on him. If any of this is based on anything in particular? I wouldn't be able to tell you.What I can tell you, is that this is very light entertainment. It also tells us, that even great persons are people too. If you can live with that and enjoy a little story that has no aim to please anything more than lightweight entertainment, than you can't do anything wrong by watching this

Goethe! is on a mission to rehumanize the godly "prince of poets" Goethe ("with O-E"), and largely succeeds. The movie picks out the period when young Johann is still trying to appease his dad by taking on a day job as assistant to the district attorney (or the mid-18.th- century equivalent to that job description) of boondocksville Wetzlar, after having faltered his legal studies in the much more mundane Strassburg. In other words, immediately before young John's groundbreaking success of "The Sufferings Of Young Werther". Goethe befriends social drop-out Jerusalem, struggles with his staunch superior Kestner, and eventually falls in love with charming ingénue Charlotte Buff, only to lose her to the better-established Kestner. Around the same time, Jerusalem commits suicide after an unhappy love affair with a married woman. Goethe processes his troublesome experiences by writing his first pageturner.To my mind this movie succeeds in bringing Goethe closer to the modern reader -- it only fails on one count: utter historical veracity. It's not a documentary, folks. Goethe failed his doctorate, but possibly not through laziness; what exactly Goethe passed his time with in Wetzlar is unclear, but he probably didn't work as a legal clerk; Kestner was therefore not his superior, and Jerusalem didn't shoot himself in front of Goethe. There, I said it.Personally, I thought two points of the movie were icky: I didn't buy that Charlotte and Goethe would have bumped uglies immediately after their first kiss (and especially not in the middle of the falling rain), and I thought the scene, when a despondent Goethe arrives in Frankfurt only to find out that Charlotte secretly had his novel published and that it turned out to be a smash hit bestseller (yadda yadda yadda), was extremely cheesy.Where the movie excels is to take us into a time that was, by modern standards, very damp, dark and filthy, but also wildly romantic.