A
film review by Michael Reuben for blu-ray.com on March 30, 2013
Still, it wasn't so long ago that such people lived, worked and drew huge audiences without the aid of spin or publicists. Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway was one of them, and so was his third wife, war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. Gellhorn was the only one of Hemingway's four wives to maintain her own career. As both mutual admirers and fierce competitors, the two were briefly a celebrity couple in the 1940s, until, like many celebrity couples, ambition split them apart. Hemingway died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1961 at the age of 61, whereas Gellhorn continued working well into her 80s. She died in 1998 of a drug overdose, after a long battle with cancer. As a condition of giving interviews, she would often insist that no questions about Hemingway be asked, saying that she did not wish to be a footnote in someone else's life. (The line appears near the end of Kaufman's film.)
Hemingway & Gellhorn is the result of years of painstaking research, not only in writings, letters and journals by and about the two writers, but also in film archives around the world. Using the latest digital technology, and without ever leaving the San Francisco Bay area, the production has seamlessly recreated a compelling story of two larger-than-life personalities whose collisions played themselves out against a background of cataclysmic events around the world.
You don't get a literary education from Kaufman's film; for that, you'd have to read For Whom the Bell Tolls, the novel that Hemingway wrote during the period portrayed in the film and dedicated to Gellhorn. Nor do you get a clear understanding of the history of the Spanish Civil War, the invasion of Normandy or any of the various theaters of World War II on which Gellhorn reported; for that, you'd have to read her dispatches or the history books that have used them as source material. What you do get is a sense of two exceptional, frequently difficult, sometimes dislikeable people, who had the drive to accomplish things that others couldn't and were willing to sacrifice everything in the process, including each other.
Gellhorn (Nicole Kidman) narrates the film as an elderly lady who gazes without blinking into an interviewer's camera. (The makeup that ages Nicole Kidman is the most convincing disguise I've seen since her Oscar-winning appearance as Virginia Woolf in The Hours.) Though American by birth, Gellhorn has lived in Britain for many years by this point and has acquired a slight English accent. Her voice has deepened from a lifetime of cigarette consumption. Establishing the distinctive tone of the older Gellhorn's voice is crucial to guiding the viewer through the film's shifting time periods and voiceovers, because the younger Gellhorn sometimes chimes in, reading her dispatches from the front.
Gellhorn meets Hemingway (Clive Owen) in 1936 in Sloppy Joe's bar in Key West, Florida, where she is visiting with her mother and brother. At the time, Hemingway is married to his second wife, Pauline (Molly Parker), with whom he has two sons, but he is always surrounded by a coterie of male friends, who, in the film, are represented by former bullfighter Sidney Franklin (Saverio Guerra). In this era, it is still possible for a serious author to become a celebrity, and currently at the height of his fame, Hemingway is enjoying the notoriety of a rock star. As aptly illustrated in the script by Jerry Stahl and Barbara Turner and faithfully portrayed by Owen, Hemingway's attitude toward his own public image is contradictory. He loves the spotlight, especially when it helps him attract beautiful women, but he also understands that fame is fleeting and ultimately unreliable.
Hemingway and Gellhorn reconnect the following year in Madrid, where Martha has gone to report on the Spanish Civil War for Collier's magazine. Hemingway was there supposedly as a reporter, but increasingly he becomes involved with a documentary film project by Dutch director Joris Ivens (Lars Ulrich) supported by American author John Dos Passos (David Strathairn). A motley crew of anti-Franco sympathizers end up staying at the same hotel, where their interactions are, by turns, comical, dangerous and sinister (the last quality being the special province of a Russian journalist, Koltsov, played by Tony Shalhoub). As their circumstances turn ever more perilous, the attraction between Hemingway and Gellhorn grows, and they become lovers.
The film follows the couple as they split and reunite across three continents and the island of Cuba, where they acquire a house called Finca Vigia. But Gellhorn has the adrenaline junkie's need to be where the action is. Instead of staying in Cuba with Hemingway while he is writing For Whom the Bell Tolls, she flies off to cover the war in Finland, where the Russians are invading. When she returns, Hemingway announces that he has divorced Pauline and proposes marriage, but for a honeymoon, Gellhorn insists on visiting China to cover the war between the forces of Chiang Kai-shek and the communists. With the greatest reluctance, Hemingway accompanies her. Later, he has himself hired by Collier's to cover D-Day, just so that Gellhorn cannot. She finds a way to get there anyway.
Hemingway's feuds with other male writers were legendary. At one point, Pauline refers to his rivalry with F. Scott Fitzgerald; the cruelty that Hemingway displayed toward Dos Passos is repeatedly shown in the film; and a famous incident involving a fistfight with the critic Max Eastman (Mark Pellegrino) is enacted in all its ridiculous detail. But no female writer ever gave Hemingway a run for his money the way Martha Gellhorn did, and at least in this interpretation, it is more than he can handle. When Gellhorn demands a divorce in 1944, Hemingway goes back to his old habits and marries another caretaker, Mary (Parker Posey), his fourth and final wife. In an overly rushed conclusion, Hemingway & Gellhorn compresses the sixteen years following the couple's divorce into a few minutes, as if Hemingway's productive life ended after he split from Gellhorn. (It didn't.)
Owen's portrayal of Hemingway treads a fine line between a realistic character and the iconic figure that the author himself deliberately cultivated after he became well-known. (One review at the time of the film's release mocked the script for having a husband address his wife as Gellhorn, but the real Hemingway was well known for such eccentricities.) As Gellhorn, Kidman has more room to maneuver, because her character is less familiar, but she also has the more difficult job of making comprehensible a woman who was unique, not just for her time, but in general. In his commentary, Kaufman expresses the hope that both scholars and the public will now reevaluate Gellhorn and her achievements. Hemingway & Gellhorn is an excellent beginning.
Labels: biography, drama, Nicole Kidman, romance, tragedy, war
IMDb 63/100
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=53, viewers=60)
Blu-ray
No comments:
Post a Comment