Acres of widescreen that only seem to distance and diminish the drama, with an overblown music score by Richard Rodney Bennett, this film shows no real interest in the talented, brilliant and finally half-mad Lady of the title, either. She is portrayed as a ridiculous, impulsive grotesque, a child-woman, although the Lady herself was a talented, tragic misfit, whose uncompromising individuality offended the hypocritically decadent high society into which she was born.
It was only after Byron caddishly jilted her that she began to go to pieces. Unfortunately, Bolt - as both writer and director - makes the fatal dramatic error of portraying her from the very outset as a mentally disturbed child: she is shown in an early scene being medicated with opium by her mother, which is made to appear a necessary medication to control her congenitally erratic and undisciplined behaviour. And Bolt the writer's portrait goes unchallenged by his wife, Sarah Miles as Lady Caroline, or by director Robert Bolt as the indulgent husband who makes a fool of her by mistaking scenery-chewing overacting as a career-defining performance; 'both' these Robert Bolts conspire to create a ludicrous caricature of an immature idiot who would have repulsed the real Byron - bad and dangerous, but not mad - from their first acquaintance. She comes across as just unhinged. There is no real character there to develop, and no dramatic interest whatsoever in such a superficial and sensational presentation.
There is no sign of the intelligent and cultured woman she actually was, whose conversation and writing were informed by the literary movements of the time. There is no sign in her relationship with Richard Chamberlain's poseur poet of anything beyond a sort of schoolgirlish infatuation, no different from any others in the mobs of squealing female fans that crowd around him. Yet she had already been the confident paramour of many eminent men. She did have 'anger management' problems, but these arose from a strong character regularly beaten by her sadistic husband and disappointed and shamed by his own extra-marital affairs. (There are also more examples of this equally empty portrayal of husband Melbourne, to be noted later.) But in such a staggeringly stupid fantasy her rages appear merely the tantrums of a childish, immature girl, and do not seem to arise from any real sense of mature self-worth and injured pride. There is no great passion here, only a mean and paltry puppet put on show - the unfortunate actress Sarah Miles, manipulated by an ambitious husband who was unwisely wedded to the sort of grandiose pretensions that only his erstwhile film-making partner David Lean could get away with.
The silly character as portrayed in the film is only besotted with the deplorably vulgar pretty-boy Byron we are given here, and is never allowed to confront and engage with the seductive challenge of his alter ego Childe Harold; indeed, when Byron is reading in public to an audience entirely composed of unaccompanied young women - surely an impossible scenario at that date? - the lush orchestral score intrudes, actually substituting for the reading, and making an irrelevance of Byron and his great work, turning the poet into no more than a sex symbol for Caro to gaze at cow-eyed, just the same as all the other dim 'groupies.' It is absurd, seeing the great Byron declaiming his verses in this way, with their enthralling words supposedly capturing Caro's devotion, when the poet is reduced to only a pretty pouting pose and a mouth opening and shutting inarticulately, like a fish in a bowl - all to the soaring strings of the orchestra! Bathos can go no further: the film is an epic of bathos.
Her long-suffering husband William Lamb is also ridiculously portrayed as a failed politician, while in fact he twice became Prime Minister of Great Britain later in his career. He was also well-educated, and would have well appreciated that Byron's work had a satiric vein that was modelled on the work of Alexander Pope, yet is shown in one scene lecturing his wife on how radically opposed Byron's 'decadent' Romantic style was to Pope's Augustan wit and restraint; in actuality he would have known that Byron's style was pithy and Classical in contrast to that of the actual 'Romantic' poets, like Keats and Shelley. The real politician's fine Parliamentary speeches as spoken in one scene are not only irrelevant to the drama but impossible to imagine coming from the mind of the dullard Melbourne given us by Bolt. The real Melbourne's unsavoury side - as above mentioned - is also left out, ensuring that this character is altogether bland, trivial, stupid and poorly realised. Melbourne was a far more intelligent and complex character than Bolt bothers to portray, despite including too many irrelevant scenes showing his life in politics. An attempt to establish Caroline's own life in the literary circles of the time would have been far more apropos.
And when at the beginning of the big romance between Caro and the idol she is shown kissing expressly because he hunts her down in the corridor scene during the ball, when she leaves because she is fighting her instincts, afraid of 'falling' in the eyes of her husband and society, and because he is dangerous and transgressive and dominating, this very much diminishes a character who in reality unashamedly 'stalked' Byron - in our terms - fully conscious and completely unconflicted in her motives. She is indeed shown pursuing him earlier disguised as a rather sexless boy, but even these scenes are drained of the sort of necessary transgressive power seen in Visconti's Death in Venice. And all passion has already been exhausted by the aforementioned orchestral mooning at Byron posing Byronically while miming unheard poetry. Bolt's reversal of the power-play between the two lovers fatally damages the strong and charismatic character which alone makes Lady Caroline an interesting person. It eviscerates the proto-feminist and turns her into a ridiculous, brittle period doll.
There is no intense intimacy in this film - no spark of life. Everything is showy and over-the-top and unreal. The script and direction is generally unfocused and splashy, missing every target on the Panavision wall. There are over-elaborated and irrelevant walk-on cameos for big-name actors Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson. What a pity the roles of Melbourne and Byron were not built up instead, and in such a way as to support the development of the titular heroine's role, instead of competing for our attention. But all we get is more violins and tears and screaming and distracting extras milling around aimlessly in a widescreen wasteland.
Lady Caroline's sudden death of a 'broken heart' - and out in a raging storm under the moon even! - is vulgar, jejeune, ridiculous tosh. Even when the 'pathetic fallacy' was an accepted metaphorical stroke, it was never proposed that the protagonist could die of it! But here Bolt makes his inflated symbol the actual agency of his character's demise: the whole creaking picture is a mechanical artifice cranked out by a talented scripwriter completely out of his depth in the director's chair, and distracted from the extensive re-writing he would have had to do on one of David Lean's polished epics.
The ugly reality of a bottle of sherry a day to drown the despair and disappointment of her life was an infinitely sadder and dramatic ending than this bathos. The unfairly and too often maligned Ken Russell's bio-pics actually never sink to such superficial disregard for their subjects. Nor, for all their much-criticised alleged excesses, are Russell's films ever this lumpen and misshapen. Bolt's screenplay and direction are all over the place, failing to focus sufficiently on the titular heroine, except insofar as his poor wife's increasingly clownish makeup obtrudes upon our attention, distracting us from taking the character seriously as any possible resemblance to a believable human being. Sarah Miles drops in the final death scene like a puppet. Bolt just lets go of the strings, giving up at last on any semblance of a living person.
He threw in the towel for good as a director, as well, leaving that arena more bruised and battered by the experience than his Byron was after his early bare-knuckle fight against a professional bruiser. The poet is shown desperately ducking and diving to avoid being overwhelmed. Perhaps Bolt realised instinctively that he was himself way out of his depth, Unluckily for him, he didn't come out of the engagement with any more glory or profit than Byron. And worse, he lost the girl - he and his leading lady divorced barely two years after the wheels came off this misfiring vehicle for her career.
Even a child with a toy theatre of cut-outs could have done no worse.
Utter tosh.
It was only after Byron caddishly jilted her that she began to go to pieces. Unfortunately, Bolt - as both writer and director - makes the fatal dramatic error of portraying her from the very outset as a mentally disturbed child: she is shown in an early scene being medicated with opium by her mother, which is made to appear a necessary medication to control her congenitally erratic and undisciplined behaviour. And Bolt the writer's portrait goes unchallenged by his wife, Sarah Miles as Lady Caroline, or by director Robert Bolt as the indulgent husband who makes a fool of her by mistaking scenery-chewing overacting as a career-defining performance; 'both' these Robert Bolts conspire to create a ludicrous caricature of an immature idiot who would have repulsed the real Byron - bad and dangerous, but not mad - from their first acquaintance. She comes across as just unhinged. There is no real character there to develop, and no dramatic interest whatsoever in such a superficial and sensational presentation.
There is no sign of the intelligent and cultured woman she actually was, whose conversation and writing were informed by the literary movements of the time. There is no sign in her relationship with Richard Chamberlain's poseur poet of anything beyond a sort of schoolgirlish infatuation, no different from any others in the mobs of squealing female fans that crowd around him. Yet she had already been the confident paramour of many eminent men. She did have 'anger management' problems, but these arose from a strong character regularly beaten by her sadistic husband and disappointed and shamed by his own extra-marital affairs. (There are also more examples of this equally empty portrayal of husband Melbourne, to be noted later.) But in such a staggeringly stupid fantasy her rages appear merely the tantrums of a childish, immature girl, and do not seem to arise from any real sense of mature self-worth and injured pride. There is no great passion here, only a mean and paltry puppet put on show - the unfortunate actress Sarah Miles, manipulated by an ambitious husband who was unwisely wedded to the sort of grandiose pretensions that only his erstwhile film-making partner David Lean could get away with.
The silly character as portrayed in the film is only besotted with the deplorably vulgar pretty-boy Byron we are given here, and is never allowed to confront and engage with the seductive challenge of his alter ego Childe Harold; indeed, when Byron is reading in public to an audience entirely composed of unaccompanied young women - surely an impossible scenario at that date? - the lush orchestral score intrudes, actually substituting for the reading, and making an irrelevance of Byron and his great work, turning the poet into no more than a sex symbol for Caro to gaze at cow-eyed, just the same as all the other dim 'groupies.' It is absurd, seeing the great Byron declaiming his verses in this way, with their enthralling words supposedly capturing Caro's devotion, when the poet is reduced to only a pretty pouting pose and a mouth opening and shutting inarticulately, like a fish in a bowl - all to the soaring strings of the orchestra! Bathos can go no further: the film is an epic of bathos.
Her long-suffering husband William Lamb is also ridiculously portrayed as a failed politician, while in fact he twice became Prime Minister of Great Britain later in his career. He was also well-educated, and would have well appreciated that Byron's work had a satiric vein that was modelled on the work of Alexander Pope, yet is shown in one scene lecturing his wife on how radically opposed Byron's 'decadent' Romantic style was to Pope's Augustan wit and restraint; in actuality he would have known that Byron's style was pithy and Classical in contrast to that of the actual 'Romantic' poets, like Keats and Shelley. The real politician's fine Parliamentary speeches as spoken in one scene are not only irrelevant to the drama but impossible to imagine coming from the mind of the dullard Melbourne given us by Bolt. The real Melbourne's unsavoury side - as above mentioned - is also left out, ensuring that this character is altogether bland, trivial, stupid and poorly realised. Melbourne was a far more intelligent and complex character than Bolt bothers to portray, despite including too many irrelevant scenes showing his life in politics. An attempt to establish Caroline's own life in the literary circles of the time would have been far more apropos.
And when at the beginning of the big romance between Caro and the idol she is shown kissing expressly because he hunts her down in the corridor scene during the ball, when she leaves because she is fighting her instincts, afraid of 'falling' in the eyes of her husband and society, and because he is dangerous and transgressive and dominating, this very much diminishes a character who in reality unashamedly 'stalked' Byron - in our terms - fully conscious and completely unconflicted in her motives. She is indeed shown pursuing him earlier disguised as a rather sexless boy, but even these scenes are drained of the sort of necessary transgressive power seen in Visconti's Death in Venice. And all passion has already been exhausted by the aforementioned orchestral mooning at Byron posing Byronically while miming unheard poetry. Bolt's reversal of the power-play between the two lovers fatally damages the strong and charismatic character which alone makes Lady Caroline an interesting person. It eviscerates the proto-feminist and turns her into a ridiculous, brittle period doll.
There is no intense intimacy in this film - no spark of life. Everything is showy and over-the-top and unreal. The script and direction is generally unfocused and splashy, missing every target on the Panavision wall. There are over-elaborated and irrelevant walk-on cameos for big-name actors Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson. What a pity the roles of Melbourne and Byron were not built up instead, and in such a way as to support the development of the titular heroine's role, instead of competing for our attention. But all we get is more violins and tears and screaming and distracting extras milling around aimlessly in a widescreen wasteland.
Lady Caroline's sudden death of a 'broken heart' - and out in a raging storm under the moon even! - is vulgar, jejeune, ridiculous tosh. Even when the 'pathetic fallacy' was an accepted metaphorical stroke, it was never proposed that the protagonist could die of it! But here Bolt makes his inflated symbol the actual agency of his character's demise: the whole creaking picture is a mechanical artifice cranked out by a talented scripwriter completely out of his depth in the director's chair, and distracted from the extensive re-writing he would have had to do on one of David Lean's polished epics.
The ugly reality of a bottle of sherry a day to drown the despair and disappointment of her life was an infinitely sadder and dramatic ending than this bathos. The unfairly and too often maligned Ken Russell's bio-pics actually never sink to such superficial disregard for their subjects. Nor, for all their much-criticised alleged excesses, are Russell's films ever this lumpen and misshapen. Bolt's screenplay and direction are all over the place, failing to focus sufficiently on the titular heroine, except insofar as his poor wife's increasingly clownish makeup obtrudes upon our attention, distracting us from taking the character seriously as any possible resemblance to a believable human being. Sarah Miles drops in the final death scene like a puppet. Bolt just lets go of the strings, giving up at last on any semblance of a living person.
He threw in the towel for good as a director, as well, leaving that arena more bruised and battered by the experience than his Byron was after his early bare-knuckle fight against a professional bruiser. The poet is shown desperately ducking and diving to avoid being overwhelmed. Perhaps Bolt realised instinctively that he was himself way out of his depth, Unluckily for him, he didn't come out of the engagement with any more glory or profit than Byron. And worse, he lost the girl - he and his leading lady divorced barely two years after the wheels came off this misfiring vehicle for her career.
Even a child with a toy theatre of cut-outs could have done no worse.
Utter tosh.