Byron
(2003/BBC Video)
Sound:
C+ Picture: C+ Extras: D Telefilm: B
Incest,
homosexuality, adultery, drug addiction, anal sex and poetry; here’s a witches’
brew even Macbeth’s weird sisters might shy away from. In the BBC TV production Byron, writer Nick Dear and director Julian Farino seem determined
to face full on a panoply of 19th century taboos and make a film that is
relevant for the 21st.
It must
be said they do a fair job of it and only flag when it comes to that ultimate
of taboos: poetry. Films about poets
don’t fare well, with the possible exceptions of Il Postino and Shakespeare
in Love, and at that the former is more about the Neruda poems than the
poet and the later concerns dramatic verse, a whole other animal. One has only to think of Sylvia, Tom and Viv
and Stevie to quickly tire of thinking at all.
Individual poems, such as “Funeral
Blues” in Four Weddings and a
Funeral and “Donal Og” in The Dead generally do much better than
any poetic biopic.
Byron is
a film about the larger than life Lord George Gordon Byron and his incestuous
love affair with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. It is tragedy and high tragedy at that. The film opens with the only reference to
Byron’s sexual ambivalence and, though nicely done, leaves the viewer waiting
for a follow up that never transpires.
Jonny Lee Miller, the grandson of Bernard Lee (M of James Bond fame), is
a slow starter as Byron and for most of the first disc of this two disc set
(160 minutes, total), he seems to float through the film instead of being the
attention magnet his lordship was known to have been. As his love affair with his sister
intensifies and, socially, begins to spin out of control, Miller ratchets up
his inner rebel and may be said to give a middling good performance. Poetry, however, seems to be beyond him as
most of what little of Byron’s verse is in the film is spoken by other
characters.
As with
many BBC productions, the surrounding cast is stellar, lead by Vanessa Redgrave
(Lady Melbourne), Philip Glenister (William Fletcher) and Camilla Power as the
totally over-the-top, believably out of control Lady Caroline Lamb. Natasha Little as Augusta Leigh lends an air
of truth and vulnerability to her role by slightly underplaying, making one
feel that she is very much tenderly in love.
The film
admirably sticks close to the surface biographical material, its focus on
Byron’s love for his half-sister providing a cohesive narrative thread
sometimes lacking in biopics. In this particular interpretation, Byron feels he
is doomed to dissipation, from the tip of his club foot to the top of his curly
coif. The Shelleys get a bit of a short
shrift; you’ll have to return to Ken Russell’s Gothic if you want to see a
recreation of the stormy inception of Mary’s masterpiece, Frankenstein, because
you’ll not find that most famous of literary nights here.
Shelley is reduced to spouting revolutionary rhetoric and not poetry
(except Byron’s); in a perhaps unintentionally funny moment, plot is telescoped
with exposition as one of Byron’s lovers chants revolutionary slogans to the
rhythm of their getting down and dirty.
Mel Brooks couldn’t top this one.
Despite
the occasional lapse, Byron feels real without compromising much on the
biographical front. Byron’s various
times in Greece bookend the film well, opening with his first expedition when
he began Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and closing with his ill-fated effort to
assist the Greeks in their war for independence. Greece and Venice are well represented, as is
Byron’s slow, inexorable spiral to a tragic early death. In between there are lovers, children, exile,
drug addiction and a sense of impending doom that would give even Sid Vicious
pause. Is this Byron as original punk
rocker?
Well,
perhaps that is overstating things a tad: one mustn’t forget Brother Cain.
- Don Wentworth
