The Broken Tower

I think that no jaundiced and hesitant Hart Crane Fan( LOVE White Buildings, DETEST The Bridge) would be more hesitant to like The Broken Tower, the bio pic in which James Franco plays the doomed lyric poet in his rise and fall as a literary celebrity, than moi. I will say, however, that the movie is a bloodless train wreck. 

Crane had one of the first celebrity poet careers: he shot to a staggering stardom at a staggeringly young age with Buildings, lived the life of a poet-celebrity, crashed and burned with Bridge, a staggeringly pretentious failure of an epic poem, and committed suicide shortly afterwords. The sadness for me lies in how close the sketches of Key West were, how Crane the artist knew he had to reign it in, get back to basics, and focus on his gifts as a imagistic lyric poet. The Crane of White Buildings, and a good deal of the Key west had discipline, an ear, a eye for narrative, and sense of lyric that served a poem rather than drawing attention to itself.

That Crane was no where to be seen in The Broken Tower. The Crane of this movie, and the Crane of The Bridge was a fucking mess. Windy, grandiose, and a bit beyond ridiculous at times, the Bridge is an epic poem that tries to capture America line by grandiose pseudo shakespearean line. And though I was impressed by the relative professionalism of Franco, I got tired of the rote tortured artist scenes in Tower, and how they fed into the myth of The Bridge. Franco doesn't introduce crane to the modern world as much as he repackages and sells the archetype of the tortured artist to another generation that doesn't need it. A gay man who created his own lyrical idiom in poetry, who went against so many currents that he became a wave in himself, Crane suffered tremendously, and I do not discount that. But putting it on parade without giving any context to his work, the thing he did to mitigate that suffering, does no one any favors.

But it wasn't an unintentionally funny celebrity train wreck. I'll give Franco that.