Young Goethe in Love (2010)

Fantastic!

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The acting in this movie is really good.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

As a child I was already an avid reader, and nothing fascinated me more than Goethe. I knew many of his poems and some of his plays by heart and up to today, I find comfort in rereading his work and nearly three hundred years later everything he wrote has still relevance. Since many years I have three heroes and all three of them have a name starting with G: Goethe, Gandhi and Gaudi. so I never miss a book or a movie telling their stories, but sometimes I miss the movies in the theater, as they are not main stream. That was the case with the Goethe movie and I happened to find it in my local library. My first reaction to the movie was not so positive. I felt like these film makers were turning the German geniuses into some kind of crazy persons, I especially felt that way with Amadeus and also Beethoven.. And the first scenes of this movie worried me that they were trying to do the same thing to Goethe. There is this entry monologue in Faust when he talks about having studied so much and learned nothing." Ah! Now I've done Philosophy, I've finished Law and Medicine, And sadly even Theology: Taken fierce pains, from end to end. Now here I am, a fool for sure! No wiser than I was before:"I always saw Goethe as Faust, a well=educated but disillusioned man seeking for the meaning of life, not a desperate love-sick youngster.. But when the movie continued I started to like it . Eighteenth century Germany is captured quite convincingly, the costumes, the sets and the landscape are beautiful and the acting persuasive. It transported me into a fantasy trying to imagine how Goethe lived as a young man. I had visited his house in Weimar after the wall fell and some of the places in Italy he favored, which helped me to understand him better.. I deeply resent the English translation of the movie title, this movie has nothing in common with Shakespeare in love and is much more realistic. I will certainly buy the DVD to add to my collection of favorite movies.

Good-humoured and not too serious fiction about the young Goethe, tall and sometimes gawky Alexander Fehling, during his stint at a law court in the modest Hessian town of Wetzlar.There he falls for the charming, gifted and sexy Lotte Buff (Miriam Stein), but sees her marry for family reasons his rich and influential boss Kestner (Moritz Bleibtreu). He also suffers the loss of his best friend Wilhelm Jerusalem (Volker Bruch), who blows his brains out. Out of these traumas comes a passionate semi-autobiographical novel, "The Sorrows of Young Werther", which overnight makes the still unsure young man a national hero. What Lotte says of the book, that it is not objectively true "Wahrheit" but creatively poetic "Dichtung", applies also to the film. The consummation of their love in a ruined abbey, ending up entwined naked in the mud, with subsequent colds that confine them to their separate beds, is filmed realistically but remains fantasy. More than a nod to Richardson's "Tom Jones" and, in the portrayal of the immortal artist as a young dog, to Shaffer's "Amadeus".

The premise of this movie is intriguing at best. Set in Eighteenth Century Germany, the costumes and scenery are succulent eye candy for the visual epicureans and history buffs alike. Impressively shot and beautifully acted, this movie has the potential to become a staple in any avid period piece fanatics movie library. Some historical inaccuracies aside, this German drama has the potential to be an impressive foreign film. "Goethe" could have easily become one of my favorite "feel good, need a good cry, want to escape from modern life" movie. Sadly, it will not be. The explicit and repetitive use of profanity and nudity (male and female) is unnecessary and spread throughout the movie. Listed as "Unrated", it should be given an "R" rating. A movie that could have been a real film gem was marred by the unnecessary filth added in. If you are somehow able to watch an edited version of this movie without all the junk thrown in, I would recommend it. Otherwise, it is a waste.

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.