"Total Eclipse" page 2
At first glance, much of the blame for this falls on Leonardo DiCaprio, whose hitherto spotless reputation will now pick up a spatter or two. DiCaprio is a fine young actor, but his capacity to convey massive intellectual arrogance expires somewhere in the vicinity of Jim "Basketball Jones" Carroll. (Why they cast an American when this quality is so plentifully available in France is a mystery.) You just can't imagine this posturing adolescent actually delivering on his grandiose boasts to reinvent reality.But things aren't quite as simple as that. After all, on what basis do we assume that DiCaprio didn't "get" Rimbaud? We know nothing about Rimbaud except for a few too-glaring facts: He's a cipher. Maybe DiCaprio, all coltish snottiness and petulance, hit the nail on the head. We are forced to admit that we don't like DiCaprio's performance because it doesn't correspond to the picture we had of
Rimbaud -- and that picture is purely imaginary, a vaporous inference drifting up from the dark gardens of his poetry. The unpleasant fact is that there is no obvious link between a writer's personality and his work.
That there is no obvious link, however, does not mean that no link exists. The biographer's task is twofold: to remain true to the facts of a life, while interpreting those facts in such a way that they create an inevitable meaning for that life. Which is simply to say that biography must be a science, but it can be an art.
Modest to a fault, Total Eclipse never aspires to such heights -- and so it falls short of its subject. Holland and Christopher Hampton, who wrote the play on which the movie is based, avoid the sentimental Romantic cliches that plague movies about writers, the facile equation of life and art, the endless shots of writers pounding feverishly on typewriters while swelling music assures us of their Lust for Life. (The act of writing, alas, is one of the unsexiest imaginable.) That might lead one to think that Total Eclipse is a salutary attempt to demythologize Rimbaud -- but it doesn't risk enough, see enough, even to do that. The result is the worst of both worlds: a banal legend, a myth gone stale.
In the end, Holland is so busy telling Rimbaud and Verlaine's story that she never tells her story, her interpretation of the connection between the facts of a life and the deeds of the imagination. It's not that her version of Rimbaud's life is wrong -- it's that it's not wrong, or right, in an interesting way. And that, considering the life she's dealing with, is unpardonable.
