Young Goethe in Love (2010)

Brilliant and touching

Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

"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.

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".

Playwright, poet and author, Johann Goethe is one of the most famous German writers. This lavish production is part biopic, part colourful historical drama and part romance, but it makes for an entertaining and bawdy romp along the same vein as Tom Jones, Shakespeare In Love, etc. The film mainly concentrates on the youthful Goethe's life before he successfully published his first novel, at the age of 22, which made him the toast of Europe. When we first meet Goethe (Alexander Fehling), he is an aspiring poet. But after several rejections from publishers, who feel that his work is uninspiring, Goethe follows his disapproving father's advice and heads to the small town of Wetzlar, where he gains employment as a law clerk working for the officious Ketsner (Moritz Bleibtreu). He shares a room with a fellow law student, the boisterous and socially uncouth Wilhelm (Volker Bruch). He also falls in love with the beautiful Charlotte (Miriam Stein). But Charlotte's father is struggling financially, and arranges for Charlotte to marry Kestner. Goethe and Kestner become rivals, which eventually leads to Goethe being imprisoned. His misadventures and the doomed romance provides the material for Goethe's first novel The Sorrows Of Young Werther. Fehling (who had a small role in Inglorious Basterds) brings a rakish charm, with, energy and charisma to his performance as the irreverent, hard drinking, 17th century slacker Goethe. Bleibtreu is suitably cold as the rather dull Kestner. Stein is feisty and sassy as Charlotte. Director Phillip Stozl (the grueling mountaineering drama North Face, etc) directs the material with a light touch. He makes great use of locations to enhance the film's atmosphere. The production design is excellent, and the film's setting reek of authenticity.