Total Eclipse Review

Rimbaud wrote the poems that broke French verse before he was twenty, and nothing in this account of him suggests how or why. Agnieszka Holland and Christopher Hampton, adapting Hampton's own play, reduce the affair with Verlaine to a series of rooms in which one man is cruel and the other weeps, repeated at intervals until the Brussels shooting breaks the pattern. DiCaprio is both badly cast and badly served. He plays the boy as a sulking American teenager, hands in pockets, vowels intact, and the anachronism might have worked as provocation if the direction had committed to it, but the film keeps setting him inside careful period interiors that argue against him.

David Thewlis is the single reason to sit through this. His Verlaine is weak, drunk, self pitying and completely credible, and the moment he sets his wife's hair alight is frightening because Thewlis plays a man startled by his own hands. The dialogue is the worst of it. Characters announce their positions on poetry and cruelty at one another in finished paragraphs, and Holland stages the exchanges with the flatness of a filmed rehearsal.