“I like a woman to talk or I’m left with the suspicion that she’s thinking.”
I’ve always considered Byron to be an elusive character. On one level there are all the nasty rumours to be sorted out about his life. Did he really bugger his wife? Did he really commit incest with his half-sister? Condemned, vilified and demonized, Byron was ostracized from decent British society, but just how much truth was there to all of those stories?
Another reason that Byron remains such a difficult character is that he spent so much time cultivating a persona for polite society. We all do this to one degree or another, but Byron seemed to take this to new heights (or depths, depending on how you look at it). So just what was the real Lord Byron, and what was pretense remains up for grabs.
For these reasons, any attempt at a cinematic translation of Byron’s life presents many challenges, and the 2003 BBC version, directed by Julian Farino, chooses to concentrate on the scandals that surrounded Byron and continued to plague him until his death at age 36. Unfortunately, there’s little reference to Byron’s contributions to literature, and instead the film focuses on the naughty, juicy parts of Byron’s life.
Jonny Lee Miller plays the Romantic poet, Byron, and the film really does an excellent job of showing how Byron cultivated his public persona complete with affectations. This two parter, at 147 minutes, charts Byron’s rise and fall in polite society, his affair with the neurotic Caroline Lamb (Camilla Power), his lust-driven tussles with his half-sister Augusta (Natasha Little) and his disastrous marriage from hell to Annabella Milbanke (Julie Cox).
The film begins with bisexual Byron cavorting in Greece, and returning to London where he manages to achieve the equivalent of nineteenth century rock star status. He has only to enter a drawing room, and his electrifying presence leaves the ladies swooning. With too little attention paid to Byron’s literary endeavors, instead the film explores his endless and energetic bedroom maneuvers. Ultimately the film finds the “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” Byron guilty of incest, cruelty, misogyny, buggery etc., etc.
Byron is not a subtle film. Taking the sensationalistic approach, there’s no room here for the viewer to decide just how much truth there was to some of the uglier rumours about Byron’s wild sex life. I don’t think it would have been an easy chore to create a film in which Byron’s allegedly incestuous relationship with his half-sister remained tantalizingly undecided, and just how a film would hint at buggery of Byron’s wife (but not show it) draws a wince from this viewer. But a much more subtle film that left some of the decision-making to the viewer is possible. I recently watched a very clever film, Madeleine, which was based on a real-life crime committed in Scotland at the end of the nineteenth century. The evidence was inconclusive, and it’s left up to the viewer to decide whether or not Madeleine was guilty. Some scenes caused me to think that Madeleine was guilty, and other scenes created doubt. Unfortunately, there are no such subtleties here, and Byron is portrayed as guilty of all the things he was suspected of. Still Byron is pretty to look at, good entertainment, and well acted, and if you’re interested in British costume drama, you won’t be able to resist.
