BEFORE: Well, I covered the life of Jack Kerouac, so why not Hemingway? And then I'll try to work in that film about J.D. Salinger this year if there's time. Might as well keep every theme I'm working on going. Parker Posey carries over from "Happy Tears" to play one of Hemingway's wives.
THE PLOT: A drama centered on the romance between Ernest Hemingway and World War II correspondent Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway's inspiration for "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and the only woman who ever asked for a divorce from the writer.
AFTER: I made the decision to split this one off from the herd of Nicole Kidman movies on the watchlist - I think she'll probably make out very well at the end of the year when I total things up. There's no way she can beat Basil Rathbone's 14 appearances as Sherlock Holmes, but she still should do very well. This is her fourth film in Year 10, and there are 7 others on the Watchlist right now. I'm going to try my best to work them in, late October and/or early November, and maybe clear that category. It can be tough to know when to move one of those from there to here, in essence I'm treating this film like it's a Parker Posey film, and it's just not, it's 90% Kidman's film. But I needed one more film to get my U.S. history film to land on July 4, so there you go. This is why I keep the chains a little fluid at all times.
I'd been waiting for HBO to re-run this, but my recent switchover to a newer DVR means that I can access many more movies On Demand in the living room now than I could before, so that timing is really great - now I didn't have to tape this in the bedroom and watch it on VHS, I could just access more of the HBO On Demand movies with the new DVR, essentially watching this on streaming rather than on tape. We're getting very close to the point where nearly every movie is available streaming on one platform or another at any given moment, but we're not QUITE there yet. I'm still glad I've got a backlog of movies burned to DVDs, because you never know when that streaming movie won't be available to stream any more. One day soon everything will be in the cloud and available all the time, I hope.
But let's get to the story, which focuses on Hemingway's third wife, how they met, what they did together and why they separated. Umm, yeah, spoiler alert, they didn't go the distance, and Hemingway was on Wife #4 when he committed suicide. Whoops, spoiler alert again, Hemingway committed suicide with a shotgun. Hey, it was in all the papers. Actually, it wasn't, because his fourth wife referred to his death as an accident for years, and only later it was revealed that he was suffering from depression, compounded by alcoholism, and also hemochromatosis, a genetic disorder that causes an accumulation of iron in the body, and can cause liver disease, heart failure, and mental and physical deterioration. (Please refrain from referring to Hemingway's condition as "ironic"...)
But before there was Hemingway's end there was Hemingway's middle. And now of course we tend to remember Hemingway how he looked when he was older, with the gray hair and the beard, when he lived in - wait, where did he live near the end of his life? Idaho? Geez, this guy got around - in an age where there was only travel by train and boat, this guy managed to live everywhere from Michigan to Paris to Toronto to Cuba to Key West. Not to mention the trips to Spain and China. But Gellhorn meets him in Key West, FL, which was a semi-permanent home for him, the place is still something of a shrine in his honor. At this point he was with his second wife and had fathered three sons, but none of his children are even mentioned in this film, probably for fear of portraying him as an absent father or some kind of deadbeat dad.
I did a whole Hemingway chain a couple of years ago, and I'm afraid I didn't watch the films based on his autobiographical books in the right order - first should have been "A Farewell to Arms" (in which he was a World War I ambulance driver), then "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (reflecting the time he got sick while on safari in Africa) and then "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (which came about from his time in Spain during the Civil War there in the 1930's). Finally, I understand why Ingrid Bergman was miscast in "For Whom the Bell Tolls", because even though her character was supposed to be Spanish, the character was based on Gellhorn, who was a blonde journalist that he was in love with.
After Spain, Hemingway moved to Cuba and took up residence in a hotel, and Gellhorn soon joined him, later they bought a farm property 15 miles away from Havana and filled it with a ton of stray cats (they later did this in Key West, too, I think). From Cuba it was on to Wyoming and then Idaho, and they got out of Cuba before World War II started, and at some point got back to Key West, where Hemingway supposedly searched for German U-Boats off the coast of Key West, though this was probably just an excuse to go fishing and drinking with his buddies.
Hemingway and Gellhorn (by now his third wife) were both correspondents during World War II, but separately, not together. It seems Hemingway preferred to leave all of his women before they could leave him, or so this story would have you believe. To me it appears more like Hemingway only married women so that he could have someone to cheat on the next time he met another pretty young thing who was interested in journalism. But while Hemingway had many problems getting close to the action (I won't get into all of his health problems here, but they're broken down on Wikipedia) Gellhorn managed to be present at Normandy on D-Day, then she moved on to report from concentration camps such as Dachau and Auschwitz.
So there's a bit of speculation involved in determining whether Hemingway just got restless and bored each time he got married, or whether he was jealous of Gellhorn's eventual success as a war correspondent. In many ways she seems to be his equal on the reporting front, but of course nobody could match him when it came to writing fiction based on these real events. Together they represented the best of both worlds, non-fiction reporting and fictional novels set in the real world, but Hemingway probably felt like he had to be the "star" of the relationship, and begrudged Gellhon's success. In the end, perhaps society is to blame, because it must have been difficult to maintain a two-writer relationship in the 1940's, all that patriarchy to deal with AND the cult of personality that had been built up around Papa Hemingway.
Hemingway shot himself in 1961, while Gellhorn survived to report from both Vietnam and the Arab-Israel conflicts in the 1970's. I'd say that living well is the best revenge, but she also committed suicide (another fact this film sort of glosses over) at the age of 80 after being diagnosed with cancer and becoming nearly blind after an unsuccessful cataract operation. Turns out every biography becomes a tragedy near the end, right?
From a filmmaking point of view, some of the effects here are interesting, where scenes appear in sepia tones or without color, to mimic newsreels of the time. Interesting, yes, but also a bit distracting. Some outdoor scenes set after the Spanish Civil War are similarly shot in the style of Hollywood films of the 1940's, where the modern actors appear to walk through NYC scenes that match the movie images that remain from that period. Watch for the Orson Welles appearance as he's fired off the set of "The Spanish Earth" after battling with Hemingway over his narration.
However, Hemingway and Gellhorn's final trip together, to China, not only receives little time, it's not placed in much historical context. I probably should do some research here, because I barely understand the difference between Chiang Kai Shek and Chou En-Lai. But there are many, many things that this film manages to either gloss over or not explain properly - like, what was the beef between Hemingway and Max Eastman, what was THAT all about? And if you're not going to explain it, then why bring it up? (Ah, it seems Eastman was a critic that claimed that Hemingway's always bragging about his masculinity was an act of over-compensation. So them Hemingway smacked him in the face with a book, it seems.)
The later shots of Hemingway letting a large marlin go, not reeling it in, I suppose are supposed to earmark Gellhorn as the "one that got away" from him, but I don't know. Isn't a fishing metaphor an inherently sexist one? I mean, maybe he didn't reel that fish in one sense, but can't you lay the blame on the relationship failing squarely on his interest in younger, sexier, more easy-to-catch fish? So the metaphor just doesn't work, or else Hemingway just isn't very self-aware.
Also starring Clive Owen (last seen in "The Pink Panther"), Nicole Kidman (last seen in "The Beguiled"), David Strathairn (last seen in "Dolores Claiborne"), Molly Parker (last seen in "The Road"), Rodrigo Santoro (last seen in "Jane Got a Gun"), Mark Pellegrino (last seen in "Mulholland Drive"), Peter Coyote (last seen in "Unforgettable"), Lars Ulrich (last seen in "Get Him to the Greek"), Robert Duvall (last seen in "The Conversation"), Tony Shalhoub (last heard in "Cars 3"), Jeffrey Jones (last seen in "The Crucible"), Santiago Cabrera, Remy Auberjonois, Anthony Brandon Wong, Joan Chen (last seen in "Judge Dredd"), Leonard Apeltsin, Aitor Inarra, Diane Baker (last seen in "Murder at 1600"), Steven Wiig, Patrick Mapel, Keone Young, Malcolm Brownson, Ivonne Coll, Alfred Rubin Thompson, with cameos from Brooke Adams, Connie Nielsen (last seen in "Justice League").
RATING: 5 out of 10 Tropicana dancers
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