Film Review: Wittgenstein

"As the scriptwriter for Wittgenstein, I have an interest in ideas but little visual imagination. The director, Derek Jarman, is just the opposite. The two of us together, then, might be thought to add up to a reasonably competent person, and when the film is really buzzing, this is what happens. But because film has to present ideas in terms of characters, there’s always the danger of reducing them to it – of catering to the prurient English interest in biography, and so reinforcing a very English anti-intellectualism. Jarman, for all his admirable radicalism, has a very English middle-class sensibility, which is light years removed from the austerity and intellectual passion of his subject. The film, then, is not uniformly brilliant. Hunky young men for whom Spinoza is probably a kind of pasta shamble around ineptly disguised as philosophers. A camp Martian crops up for no particular reason, uttering wads of embarrassing whimsy. (None of this, I swear, in the original script.) But Karl Johnson, a veritable Ludwig lookalike, is splendidly intense and intelligent, and much of the movie scintillates with Jarman's bizarrely creative imagination. Does it manage to photograph ideas? I doubt it. Nobody will emerge with a grasp of the finer points of the Tractatus. If you’re filming the story of a philosopher, you need a director with some respect for the mind. But Wittgenstein gives you a reasonable general idea of what Ludwig was on about, along with some memorable images of the life."

Terry Eagleton, Ludwig Wittgenstein - A Suitable Case for Treatment, collected in Figures Of Dissent: Reviewing Fish, Spivak, Zizek and Others.
Quite.
Fagburn watched this curio for the first time yesterday - and was looking for some way of summing up its many failings.
The talented Mr Eagleton wrote the original screenplay for Wittgenstein, which Derek Jarman then proceeded to muck around to buggery.
But I suppose any collaboration between the Marxist critic Eagleton and the arch snob Jarman was bound to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.