When a tyrant wants to employ a person, is it wiser to accept and try to tame the despot at close range, or to stand aside, keep a clean slate and watch others suffer? This is the question posed by a new feature film about the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca, which premiered this week at the Berlinale festival in the German capital.
The film about the philosopher Seneca, played by John Malkovich, who sells out to a tyrant, compares the emperor Nero to Donald Trump. | Video: Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin
Stoic philosopher, man of letters and politician Seneca raised Emperor Nero, who eventually forced him to commit suicide. The philosopher cut his veins in AD 65. His death was a frequent subject in art history, for example in 1773 he painted Frenchman Jacques-Louis David. Now the whole movie revolves around her.
“I tell the story of the last night in Seneca’s life, when, just before his death, he asks himself fundamental political, personal and philosophical questions,” summarizes the German screenwriter and director Robert Schwentke. According to him, the question of whether and to what extent to serve the powerful is still relevant.
He shot the film in Morocco with a minimal budget, in almost theatrical settings. And in it he shows only minimal sympathy for the eloquent philosopher Seneca, who is played by the sixty-nine-year-old John Malkovich as if even his own death did not concern him. “The character in the movie talks a lot. It wasn’t easy to combine that with the fact that he’s going to die the next day and be silent forever,” Malkovich said on the red carpet.
Emperor Nero, portrayed by Tom Xander, is stubborn, childish, and willing to kill or humiliate anyone who crosses his path. Including his former teacher Seneca, who tried to moderate Nero’s tyrannical tendencies for so long that the despot stopped enjoying it. “When preparing for the role of Nero, I was inspired by a whole constellation of contemporary personalities and events,” Xander claims.
Seneca does not come out of the film as a nice guy. To add drama to his own death, he asks his young wife, played by Lilith Stangenberg, to take her own life as well. “I think that if Seneca lived today, he would be a life coach. Today, he might have his own TV show,” thinks the fifty-five-year-old director Schwentke, who studied philosophy in Germany, after which he went to film school in the USA in 1989. It belongs to his better-known pictures Mysterious flight from 2005 starring Jodie Foster.
Seneca is considered so important in the novel that his death may even entertain the audience in the end. According to the representative of the Roman aristocrat Geraldine Chaplin, the 78-year-old daughter of the comedian Charlie Chaplin, this is not enough, although humor has its limits.
“My father made The Dictator about eighty years ago,” reminds Chaplin’s anti-war wife satire from 1940, which caricatured Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. “Dad hoped to change the world with that film. All he achieved was to make people laugh. But humor is the most powerful weapon. This film is also very funny,” says the actress.
According to to Deadline.com however, the film resembles a two-hour monologue, and despite Malkovich’s enthusiasm, few viewers can endure it. It does not offer much deeper thought than that Seneca sold himself to a tyrant. The story set in ancient times is not helped by the fact that, in an allusion to politicians like Donald Trump, Emperor Nero is addressed as “Mr. President” and talks about how mentally stable he is. Trump said in a 2018 tweet marked for “stable genius”.
According to the reviewer, Malkovich is so unbearable in the main role that film journalists shouted at his character by the end of the film to finally kill himself on the screen and let there be peace. Testimony confirms website Theplaylist.net, according to which the critics at the Berlinale are traditionally more respectful, which is not a good business card for the film.
The Hollywood Reporter magazine in this regard writes about “a bizarre attempt at some kind of historical fantasy” and notes that if Nero is to be Donald Trump on screen, it’s unclear who the filmmakers are comparing Seneca to. “Should it be Steve Bannon? One of the first ministers of the Trump administration like James Mattis or Rex Tillerson? All of them eventually lost the leader’s favor just like Seneca, who in the film is just constantly lying to his pocket,” notes the critic, according to whom the parallel between the decline of the old Rome and the present does not work.
The novelty does not yet have a Czech distributor. Actor John Malkovich, known for the films Killing Fields, S nasadjem života or Burn After Reading, was supposed to present a theater production for one actor called The Infamous Ramirez Hoffman in Prague a few months ago. However, the organizer canceled the event. The project was supported by the same organization that successfully brought Malkovich to the Kroměříž garden last summer with the project The Music Critic.
