Butler's Cinema Scene

Miriam Stein and Alexander Fehling

“YOUNG GOETHE IN LOVE”  My rating: B- (Opening Dec. 23 at the Tivoli)

100 minutes | No MPAA rating

Think “Shakespeare in Love” — German division — and you’ve pretty much got the number of “Young Goethe in Love,” a pleasant little romance about an artistic genius in his formative years.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is to German literature what Shakespeare is to English literature. Nearly 300 years  after his birth Goethe remains the single most celebrated and influential poet/dramatist/essayist in the German language.

But as  Philipp Stolzl’s film begins, young Goethe is facing early burnout. He shows up late to face a panel of educators who will rule on whether he gets his law degree; it soon becomes obvious that Goethe (Alexander Fehling) has spent most of his university years partying and scribbling fiction.

His exasperated father sends him to a backwater burg where he will be a clerk of the law court. There he’s befriended by another shy clerk (Volker Bruch); the two almost immediately become the objects of ridicule from the other ink-stained wretches…that is until Goethe shows just how quickly and accurately he can work under pressure.

Love comes in the form of Lotte Buff (Miriam Stein), oldest daughter of a widowed struggling businessman.

Lotte is bright, pert, funny and strong-minded. Goethe is smitten.

But unbeknownst to the future poet, she also is being courted by Goethe’s boss  and new friend Kestner (Moritz Bleibtreu), who is as shy and tongue-tied as Goethe is clever and articulate. (There’s a bit of “Cyrano” being recycled here as well.)

Moritz Bleibtreu

Poor Lotte much prefers the funny, charming Goethe. But her family’s survival depends upon her marrying the wealthy barrister.

The whole mess becomes the basis for Goethe’s first successful book, the long poem “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” a fictionalized account of his first love. A little early heartbreak, it seems, is good for one’s writing.

“Young Goethe in Love” is an amiable romantic piffle. Fehling and Stein make for an attractive, coltish couple; the settings and costume are eye-catching, and Stolzl brings to the proceedings a gentle sense of humor.

Particularly effective is Bleibtreu, who is so good as the socially inept Kestner that it’s hard to believe he’s the same actor who so effectively played ‘70s urban terrorist Andreas Baader in the excellent “The Baader Meinhof Complex.”

|  Robert W. Butler