By Our Selves *** (2015, Andrew Kotting, Toby Jones, Freddie Jones, Eden Kotting, Alan Moore) – Movie Review

Director Andrew Kotting investigates the life and thoughts of the poet John Clare in this typically eccentric and engaging documentary that carries on his profitable obsession with road trips. Remember how it started with Gallivant in 1997?

It starts as hard work, with the first 20 minutes like watching black and white paint dry, but then gradually engrosses and grips, and by the midway it’s amusing, informative, entertaining and by the end very touching too.

Toby Jones plays John Clare, valiantly re-treading his steps in black and white re-stagings of the poet’s 1841 trip through Epping Forest, Essex, to Northampton. His dear old dad Freddie Jones also appears and finally is asked to reminisce about playing Clare in a BBC film 40 years ago, still even able to remember most of the man’s poetry he learned way back then.

Kotting interviews him and various other folks, and emerges seeming real, kindly and a genuine one-off, someone civilised and witty you’d love to invite to dinner. His daughter Eden also appears, as Dorothy.

Farm labourer’s son John Clare (July 13 1793 -May 20 1864) was an English poet known for his celebratory representations of the English countryside and his lamentation of its disruption. For this, especially, he obviously was a man after Kotting’s heart. His memorial at his Helpston birthplace calls him ‘The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet’.

In 1841, Clare absconded from the High Beach asylum in Essex to walk 90 miles home, believing that he was to meet his first love, Mary Joyce. This is the trip Toby Jones re-stages.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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