Total Eclipse (1976) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) and Tuna

Rimbaud was a child prodigy ala Mozart, but from an unexpected setting. Unlike Mozart, who was educated to be what he became, Rimbaud grew up in a farming family, and taught himself everything, with the guidance of some sympathetic local teachers who recognized his brilliance and gave him access to their books. He is considered the first modernist, as important to poetry as the impressionists were to art, but his reputation is based entirely on his work as a teenager. He quit writing at 19, and his retirement wasn't just the usual posturing bullshit. He really quit forever.

He wrote:

And that WAS that. He walked away from Paris, became a trader in Africa and ran a successful business pretty much until his fatal tumor took over his life. He successfully avoided European society, civilized talk, culture, the arts, and writing. And if memory serves, I think he lived those post-artistic years completely as a heterosexual.

I think I have pointed out several times that I got interested in Rimbaud after I first saw this movie. I read everything I could find on him or by him, and I eventually realized that the casting of Leo D. was a masterstroke. I don't really like DiCaprio any more than most guys do, but he IS Rimbaud. If you read the physical description of Rimbaud, or what his personality was like, you realize that it required no acting at all from Leo. DiCaprio may or may not be Kenneth Branagh in the acting department, but except for the author, Leo was the only person who had a clue what was going on in this movie, and he did a good job on the innocent-looking, arrogant, self-absorbed, foul-mouthed, feral, boorish, reckless, immature, drug-addled genius who "decided to originate the future". That wasn't lousy acting. That was a perfect portrayal. That's the way Rimbaud was, as bad at being human as he was good at writing poems.

DiCaprio took a lot of grief from the critics for his American accent, and that was totally unjustified. There is no reason why a British accent is more appropriate than an American accent for playing a Frenchman. For that matter, the American accent makes just as much sense as the usual cinema cliché of having someone portray a Frenchman by speaking very bad English with a heavy French accent. The real Rimbaud came from the provinces, and I suppose his pronunciation would have sounded unsophisticated to Parisians, and they would have sounded stuffy to him. In that regard, it makes a lot of sense for DiCaprio to sound casual and American while Thewlis sounded stuffy and British. What made no sense at all in that context was having Verlaine's wife speak very bad English with a heavy French accent. (The actress was really French.) Since Verlaine's speech pattern established the convention that upper crust British speech was standing in for bourgeois Parisian speech, the casting of his wife should have followed this convention.

Is the movie worth watching if one is not especially interested in 19th century French poetry? Good question. The answer is "probably not".

• It centers around the homosexual relationship of two thoroughly despicable, but highly talented men. It shows them as they were, not as people wish them to have been. Not many people will find it pleasant to pass two hours in their company.
• It's a pretty good movie but it didn't know where to end. It must have about a half-hour of anticlimax at the end (after Verlaine shot Rimbaud), and the director didn't know how to present that within the narrative structure so she really resorted to a trite technique. Many years after the main story, old man Verlaine met Rimbaud's old sister in a cafe, and the sister narrated the remainder of the story in a flashback with a voice-over.
• The other main weakness of the movie's internal structure is that it portrays Verlaine as a totally repulsive person, and gives the viewer no understanding of why such a man was loved by both his beautiful teenage genius poet, and his sexy, rich, and much younger wife.