BRANAGH IS LAWRENCE

Okay, now put the chess pieces back in their rows and let’s play the game again. This time we switch sides: this is about a MAN looking for love, in fact, D.H. Lawrence. It’s 1985, his centennial year, and the writer of the movie wants you to know there’s more about this guy than sex. Switch sides from red pieces to white -- this time it’s love, not sex. But the point of origin is the same: love of an extraordinary mother, aristocratic, son-loving, like the mother of Tennessee Williams. It is a different place and time, a different phenome from a similar genome. This son loves women and they love him.

This son, called Burt, has two sets of parents: one for his heart -- his early-dying, piano-playing, educated mother and his hard, uneducated coal miner father, whom he hates as the backside of love. (The images of the faces as father and son sit in front of a coal fire on the night of the mother’s burial are rich with meaning. “Sons are sposed ta luv theer mithers,” says the old man. “It’s in the natoore of things. For hoosbands, it’s different.”) Then there are the parents of Burt’s mind, Professor Hopkin and his wife. Kind, learned, and insightful. And, unlike that actress in the last movie, Lawrence has enormous talent and the expectation of work at developing it. (He doesn't look like Twiggy. He looks like my dead artist brother.)

We’re in a different country now: not louche and traumatized Italy after WWII but Edwardian Britain before WWI. The women wear white and lace or black taffeta. The love object is Helen Mirren again, but this time she is merely an anchor point (Frieda Van Richtohfen) while Kenneth Branagh twirls and orates around her. (Mirren is fine, but Branagh is no less than inspired, his tongue magical as he delivers Lawrence’s poetry. In 1885 he was so young!)

The movie ends just as they have decided they are meant to be together for life -- soul mates indeed -- and pause in the beautiful landscape to discuss it all, which is the kind of intercourse they love most. We can’t help feeling a bit teased. As one of the imdb.com critics remarks, they’re just beginning! Now what happens? Where’s the part about Taos? But this is not so much a narrative as an homage.

Anyway, the truth is that their life together was not anchored and blissful. WWI made national enemies of them, esp. since Frieda was German and Burt railed against war, and that meant the writing -- the sole source of income -- had to be put out in great reams, gushes, gouts, and cataracts. One of the ways to do that was to travel and write about it, so they roamed Europe and many other continents.

At one point Lawrence, who tried to pay no attention to categories like heterosexual and homosexual -- which are in large part cultural constructs anyway -- did a bit of experimenting. But he and Frieda were sophisticated: she was from “Bloomsbury on the Danube”: Vienna. She mothered him and nursed him as he struggled with his weak lungs, dying at 44. At that point Frieda was in her fifties and after Burt’s death remarried to an Indian, a man patient and even fatherly. And there was money again.

It sounds dramatic, but in fact a movie about a lot of packing and unpacking with writing going along in between is not so satisfactory, aside from being expensive to make. So the solution -- in order to make a theatre-length movie -- is a brisk bright parallel plot: a slacker male and a mother female, both D. H. Lawrence fans and scholars. Scholarly intercourse. He’s attracted -- he’s like Lawrence: he likes women! She’s tolerant. But she’s modern. Her head rules. One of her rules is honesty. So which is the truth, the slacker male who fancies Lawrence was free and easy, or the motherly and perceptive woman who tells the truth about love?

There is no physical nakedness in either story. We are not shown either couple in bed. But if one listens carefully and watches these gifted actors closely, the answer is quite clear. I was supposed to send this movie back to Netflix yesterday, but I keep wanting to watch it one more time. This one, rather than Roman Spring, but I’ll keep that, too, and send them back together because then Netflix can send me “Sons and Lovers”, the miniseries version, both discs together. (I have a two-disc subscription.)

Now I’m going to go search my bookshelves for books by and about Lawrence. I collected them when I was thinking about how to write “Bronze Inside and Out, a Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver,” but the connection goes back to Northwestern University when I knew this kind of man like Burt, a little group of us rather like the group that meets in the movie to discuss their work and resist capitalism. I knitted us all mufflers like the one Dean Stockwell wore in the 1960 movie and still have mine, fifty years later. D.H. Lawrence, like Tennessee Williams, were cornerstone figures for us, and they have proven meaningful to me even on the Blackfeet reservation prairie.

In fact, I’ve been much more successful at resisting capitalism than the other members of that group.