Pandaemonium (2001)

Julien Temple always is a bit l'enfant terrible of British cinema. Not because he made such great movies as after all he largely will be remembered as the man from popvideos (David Bowie, Janet Jackson), the overblown musical that is Absolute Beginners or the dreadful Earth Girls Are Easy but BBC Films gave him the opportunity to shoot Pandaemonium which tells the story about the poet Coleridge and his famous poem Kubla Khan. Whether it is historical true or not is beyond my knowledge but this movie tells the story about some genius poet who lived in the time of the great Lord Byron and whose talents were exploited by his friend who served him opium. At these days opium was the coke and we see how a talented poet with a wish for the family life turns into a total wreck. All by all Temple can control himself (just at the end credits he once again looses himself completely into nonsense) and tells the story in a rather modern way without too many details that can spoil the fun for those who are unaware of the British neoromantism. But mind you, "Pandaemonium" has its weak moments, perhaps a bit too many to be good, but still worth watching.

This movie is totally divorced from the historical realities of the subject matter it purports to represent. It fabricates intrigues and events that never happened to Wordsworth and Coleridge, and omits important stages and events in their lives, like their trip to Germany, or Coleridge's sojourn in Malta.If you make it through the lousy acting and made-for-TV cheesy production values to the climax of the film, you are treated to a ridiculously lurid scene where we learn of betrayal and harm that just never happened in real life.One clue that the screenwriter Boyce had no interest in maintaining any sense of historical accuracy can be seen in that fact that he has his characters refer to Coleridge as "Sam". As it turns out, throughout his life, Coleridge was called by friends and associates "Col" or "Samuel" or "Estece" (from his initials "S.T.C.") but never just plain "Sam".

(minor spoiler)where Wordsworth turns with gleeful villainy and spouts some sort of line like "I destroyed it because I DETEST it, and everything it stood for." And then he curls his moustache and ties Coleridge's small son to a railroad track... wellmaybe I made up that last part... The performers were quite good, but script was awful because the script I assume was written on a bet to try and mix a Scooby-Doo adventure with BBC melodrama. Because at the end our villain is unmasked, our hero is vindicated and Wordsworth might have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those darn hippies. CURSES, foiled again.This film is an embarrassment to history, to screenwriting, and to literature. I gave this film a 1 because there is no zero.

This movie does a good job of demystifying poets and poetry, and conveying the temptation and wastefulness of drug addiction. Ultimately, though, it's an unnecessarily complicated film with a drifting moral center and a real lack of focus (some will attribute this to its desire to recreate the opium mindset, but that's a cop-out). The splintered sympathies and victimized viewpoints make it hard to care about any of the characters. A waste of solid acting.