He tried to kill the cat. For that alone he deserves death. Parallels to The Broken Tower in the poet's strained (to put it gently) relationship with his father, who in both movies is played by a man who doesn't seem well suited to play anyone's father at all--too young, with too high-pitched a voice. Also surprisingly strong parallel to Genius, three years later, though this is of course more overtly homoerotic. Not just in the magnetic literary golden boy beloved by other men, but in his relationships (or rather, neglect thereof) with the women in his life (or mostly out of it). Though once again the feminism was not overplayed, nor, actually, compared to the real lives on which it is based, was the f**gotry. This is a movie that could actually have been far gayer, not just sexually but politically, and still been accurate. Once again, I appreciate the comparative restraint, compared to what this film would have been if made only ten years later. Sex scenes in movies still cringe me out, het or homo. And I can't help thinking about those straight actors having to kiss other dudes. However any regard I had for the film evaporated altogether when it inserted absurdly anachronistic nonsense about 'honor slaying' (a neverexistent legal concept based on the term for when Muslims kill their daughters for looking at or thinking about men) and has a contemporary (1940s) legal textbook use the terms 'homosexual', and worse, 'heterosexual' when as anyone who has read anything knows the contemporaneous terms were 'pervert' and 'normal'. 'Heterosexual' as a term to denote someone with the natural desire for the opposite sex would not be succesfully propagated by the queers to equate normal life-giving human sexual reproduction with death-bringing buggery till decades later. For a mainstream film with this budget? How many people worked on it and no one saw an issue? The bit that Rat((())) reads from the book is laughably clumsy, just so, so hilariously bad. It's a piece of queer theory immoralising about what the 'gay panic defense' was slapped into a 1940s law manual as the presentation of that defence. This is a phenomenon observable among all communists everywhere, from Mao's China to Middle America. They are so overwhelmingly intolerant of dissent--dissent is so inconceivable to them--that they cannot even honestly engage with their enemies or their ideas, instead they must create a caricature of their enemies ideas, substituting their own propaganda for the enemy's propaganda, and refute that. The enemies they attack and the ideas they denounce are created from the whole cloth of communism; they are fighting figments of their own imagination (like when trannies unironically and unselfconsciously disqueef online about how much they hate 'gender' and want to see it abolished). Just like in The Post with 'Domino Theory' and that movie about Emily Dickinson with its 'gender.' Or every time a leftist brings up 'trickle down economics'. Their system of values is so totally alien to and divorced from all human history and experience, so utterly at odds with the age-long life of mankind, to maintain it requires such a continual rejection of reality and substitution of ideology in its place, they're not capable of recreating in fiction the ideas of the past, even the very recent past, the past within the living memory of many. Liberals are so locked in the prison asylum of their own lunatic ideology that they're utterly incapable of representing any opposing view at all plausibly, even though all they'd have to do is listen to someone or read something from outside of their bubble. It's just so embarrassing for them. But they can't see it, because they never step outside of their echo chamber to look at themselves, at how ludicrous they look within it.