subject: Watch The Broken Tower Full Movie 2012 Online [print this page] A stone-skipping account of the life trajectory of poet Hart Crane as opposed to a well developed biographical drama, James Franco's The Broken Tower is something of a companion piece to Howl, in which Franco starred last year, in its unconventional treatment of a gay renegade twentieth century American writer. The definition of what most people would consider arty, this rarified slice of indie esoterica was shot in rather striking black-and-white, features huge slabs of very difficult verse being read aloud as well as long scenes of the subject just walking around and includes one entirely gratuitous shot of what may or may not actually be the first former host of an Oscar telecast performing an explicit sexual act on another man, the uncertainty stemming from the deliberate darkness in which it was filmed. Franco's name will get this around to various festivals and perhaps into very limited specialized release where the gay angle will help, but genuine enthusiasm will be scarce.
The imposing impenetrability of his notably ahead-of-its-time poetry notwithstanding, Hart Crane led a life so impassioned, questing and intense that it's surprising the story has been ignored this long. Had Ken Russell ever chosen to make a film about an American poet, he could have created a really demented gay fantasia about him, to borrow Tony Kushner's subtitle for Angels in America.Born in Cleveland to a wealthy candy manufacturer who invented the Life Saver (no small irony given the mode of his son's death), Crane, who was born in 1899, embraced the life-affirmingWalt Whitman, rejected the negativity of T.S.Eliot, picked up sailors around Brooklyn where he lived , was as close to out as one could be in the 1920s and felt he was no good at anything but writing. He was something of an American Rimbaud, in that he burned bright and flamed out early.
Inspired by the writer's series of Voyages poems, writer-director and poetry grad student Franco, working from a biography by Paul Mariani, has divided the life into twelve voyages or titled chapters. We see the teenage Crane (Dave Franco, the director's younger brother) overhearing his parents' calamitous arguments, then attempting suicide; the slightly older Crane's assignation with a lover in a truck's cab at night; his impassioned anti-Eliot screed that We all know life is a dance with death but we can still do something with it; a lengthy poetry reading at a sedate ladies' club; various attempts to write; a love affair with a seaman (Michael Shannon, with barely a line to say but Crane's bare bum offered up); what must be the most depressing trip of a notable writer to Paris apart from that of Oscar Wilde; extensive shots of the poet at his venerated Brooklyn Bridge and, at last, his suicide by jumping ship in the Gulf of Mexico after embarking upon his apparent first heterosexual liaison.
The real issue here, however, is the film's style, which is straight '60s hand-held, on-the-streets New Wave stuff with a dollop of Dardenne Brothers behind-the-head following shots stirred in for good measure. Franco has acknowledged the specific influence of Godard's 1962 Vivre sa vie, which is plausible enough.But despite the highly mobile and often arresting work of cinematographer Christina Voros, who has previously worked with Franco on a short and his Saturday Night documentary as well as having directed a making-of on 127 Hours, The Broken Tower is not a heady experience like many of the semi-experimental 1960s films he emulates. Instead, it's mostly a tedious chore, much akin to listening poetry you don't much like. Without a text or expert to guide you, Crane's poetry is tough to gasphe admitted it himselfwhich, minus any involving drama having been developed, is true for this film as well. Watch free movies online
Crane's demons occupy center stage here, to the point of blocking out the intelligence and literary verve that allowed him to translate his tortured personal life into such influential works as "My Grandmother's Love Letters," "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," and his epic poem The Bridge, an optimistic response to the dim worldview found of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Crane's poetry is far from ignored. Though he largely composes the film out of brief snatches and sidelong glances, Franco devotes more than 10 uninterrupted minutes to the poet's early-career reading in New York. Various works can be heard throughout The Broken Tower, often used in voiceover to stitch together disparate shots of Crane's nomadic existence. These glimpses of Crane's gifts largely take a backseat to scenes of disillusionment, anger, and anomie: bitter arguments with his industrialist father; drunken revelry collapsing into hung-over gloom. Even his tender relationship with sailor Emile (Michael Shannon) becomes marred by Crane's emotional inexpressiveness. Franco is hardly the first to underline to disconnect between an artist's professional triumphs and private failings. Without a stronger sense of how Crane's rage and depression fed his poetry, however, the film's portrait becomes curiously bifurcated. There's little to do besides luxuriate in the film's black-and-white moodiness, with Crane's stormy temperament and transatlantic wanderings edging uncomfortably close to doomed-artist romanticism.
It's easy enough to dismiss The Broken Tower as calculated and self-indulgent on its director's part. His fingers quite publically placed in several higher-education pies, Franco has self-consciously fashioned himself as a winking polyglot rebel, mixing high-profile studio gigs with forays into literary fiction, academia, and low-budget filmmaking. He's also positioned himself on the edge of celebrity masculinity, courting homoerotic projects and projecting a general fascination with queer art and culture. What better way to solidify both public personae than playing a gay, doomed, early-20th-century poet? (He's certainly willing to suck a prosthetic dick for his art.) Call it what you like: dilettantism, attention-whoring, overreach. I understand the Franco backlash without really feeling it. To me, there's something undeniably fascinating about his aesthetic obsessions, which seem to link pastness, queerness, and literariness into some vague nexus of artistic purity. The Broken Tower doesn't say much of note about any of these things. It's tonally flat and a little too impressed with its own elliptical construction. (Did we really need those chapter headings, which muddle the immediacy of DP Christina Voros's black-and-white cinematography with studied listings of the plot points that will occur in the subsequent segment?) Yet there's something about Franco's desire to escape the straitjacket of the biopic's pat psychologizing and greatest-hits structure that makes his film feel at least honest in its missteps. Those walking sequences become paradigmatic of The Broken Tower as a whole: admirable in their willingness to leave well-trodden paths, but unsure of what one does afterward.
