THE STORY – A writer stumbles across the love of his life only to discover that the young woman is engaged. Despite the urgings of his hypochondriac best friend, he soon turns his world upside down in a desperate, misguided, and hilarious quest to win her heart.
THE CAST – Douglas Booth, Alison Pill, Iris Apatow & Patrick J. Adams
THE TEAM – José Lourenço (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 101 Minutes
In its own words, José Lourenço’s “Young Werther” is “based on the smash hit 1774 novel of tragic romance that drove the entirety of Europe into a full-on literary tizzy.” It’s true – Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” was a bona fide literary sensation in its time, catapulting the young Goethe to fame and inspiring a “Werther fever” that manifested in a fashion craze among young men, among other things. The novel’s tremendous staying power has inspired numerous adaptations, parodies, and sequels over the past two and a half centuries, so you might expect a film version to be full of big-studio prestige. Lourenço’s version, however, is decidedly modest in its presentation (if not its ambition), taking a cast of Hollywood B-Listers and letting them shine on the streets of Toronto in an amiably comic spin on the material. While it may not be the grand cinematic pleasure one might envision for such classic source material, this “Young Werther” is not without its pleasures.
Young hedonist Werther (Douglas Booth) is in Toronto on a mission to fetch a family heirloom for his mother. While there, he sees Charlotte (Alison Pill) witheringly dressing down a would-be suitor for her sister, Sissy (Iris Apatow), and falls in love on the spot. He introduces himself and ingratiates himself enough to get an invite to a party they’re hosting that evening, where he and Charlotte drink and flirt. Unfortunately, Charlotte is engaged to be married to lawyer Albert (Patrick J. Adams), a perfect man who recurrently seems more devoted to his work than to Charlotte. In order to win Charlotte’s hand, Werther decides to simply befriend her for the summer and show her how much better of a man he is than Albert.
Naturally, none of this goes the way Werther expects. The charismatic Booth barrels through every scene with the carefree abandon of the young, beautiful, and wealthy. Good thing, too, because Werther can be insufferable, especially in Lourenço’s hyper-literate, hyper-speedy dialogue. While often incredibly funny, the screenplay has a very arch tone that exhausts as much as it invigorates. This leaves it up to the cast to compensate, which they do in spades. Everyone with a speaking role is full of personality, and they all light up the screen with good vibes and positive energy. Pill’s feistiness shines through in early scenes, but the way she lets the walls she’s built up slowly crumble in Werther’s presence really draws you to her. She’s a perfect foil for Booth, and their exceptionally sweet chemistry makes every beat of their romance land, even (and perhaps especially) when they protest it. They somehow manage to make the act of washing dishes seem like the height of romance.
Lourenço films “Young Werther” with plenty of color, washing scenes in vibrant colors that always come directly from the environment, and thus never feel like a heavy-handed aesthetic choice. Make no mistake, though, there are plenty of heavy-handed aesthetic choices in the film, mostly surrounding comic moments of editing or scoring (a choir singing Charlotte’s name on the soundtrack earns one of the film’s biggest laughs). The blurry backgrounds and slightly overexposed lighting often betray the film’s low budget, but Lourenço gives the film enough visual style and verbal wit to compensate for that.
The film’s plot, which hews remarkably closely to the original novel until the last act, can’t help but feel episodic and even a bit thin. While each individual scene is smartly written with plenty of deliciously tart dialogue for the actors to sink their teeth into, they also feel like archetypal scenes we’ve seen countless times before, with little to elevate them. A scene where Charlotte has Werther help her unzip a dress at a sample sale has been shot, edited, and performed for maximum romanticism, and yet something about it still feels a little chintzy, a little like a first draft. Still, Lourenço does a decent job updating the story in a way that feels plausibly of this century, which is no easy feat. Hopefully, the industry takes note of what he was able to do with such limited resources because while he never fully overcomes them, the extent to which he does is impressive enough to make him a filmmaker to watch.
