My childhood love of Christian Bale endures with this murder mystery. Bale plays detective Augustus Landor brought to West Point where he meets a young Edgar Allan Poe (played by Harry Melling of Harry Potter fame - also the grandson of the third Doctor Who Patrick Troughton). Naturally, I read the book this was based upon first which was fantastic. Poe was written exactly how I would have imagined him as a young man struggling to find himself.
I won’t give away the mystery and, as expected, the film is no where near as suspenseful as the book. The fictional story stars with Augustus Landor being called out of retirement to use his powers of detection on an unusual death at the nearby military academy, West Point. A cadet was found hanging from a tree, his heart having been skillfully cut out of his chest. Landor almost instantly attracts the attention of an older cadet by the name of (you guessed it) Edgar Allan Poe. The film does not got into much about how Poe ended up at West Point, but they stay true to how he was depicted in the book - a mix of arrogance and awkwardness.
Poe is already a writer at this point, having published a few poems and building criticism to other books (he makes a sour face when he sees Fenimore Cooper on Landor’s shelf). As the mystery continues, Poe is a realistic young man and artist. He is boastful, yet self-conscious. Talented, yet wasteful of his talent. Fanciful and romantic, yet when faced with grim truths is willing to find a way to deal. He and Landor bond over words, morals, and alcohol.
The woman targeted for Poe’s affection is the sister of one of his classmates, Lea (Lucy Boynton). Her parents (Toby Jones and Gillian Anderson) welcome both Landor and Poe into their home in the midst of the horrors. Poe’s relationship with Lea is more of a flirtation based on two young people who have faced death in their lifetimes. This makes sense to me. I feel like Poe probably was one of those young men who reminded people often that his birth mother and foster mother passed away.
Above all else, this film reminds you that he is a person obsessed with words and it is that obsession with words which unravels the end of the mystery.
I wanted to know what some Poe experts thought of this movie. No one has e-mailed me back yet. Perhaps they didn’t like it as much as I did.
