If you are going to judge any writer or artist since a moral standard, a contemporary politically correct moral standard, you can rid off almost all the great art of the past because if you are looking for saints, people who love cats and feed birds, that people could be your type of friendly person of today, but they never will produce a piece of art, you are looking on the wrong part of humanity.
What make great Hemingway is not he was a admirer of bull fights, like millions of others. Was not he hunt animals like millions of others. Was not he use rifles and guns, like millions of others. Was not he get drunk every single day of his life like millions of others. He could be one piece of crap like million of others. But he created some of the most fascinating and important books from the last century, on any language. He could be like your sorry and politically correct and double standard ass of today, but he wasn't. He could have a farm with beautiful little animals. Nobody cares for someone like that, unless he finally write something absolutely marvelous, like all the great books he wrote. If you like animal care, you can retire to a farm and watch over piggies, cows, bulls, chickens and worms, and wait for someone film a biopic about you.
But Hemingway wrote some of the most important and memorable books of the past century on any language. Some of those books are brutal, because he live a brutal life, someone who ends by took his own life the way he lives. Millions of people has done that, too. But if you write The Oldman and the Fish, A farewell to arms, From whom the belss tolls, Death in the afternoon, Green Hills of Africa, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and win the Nobel Prize, man that's a life worth to live and worth to be told and retold.
I'm not American, but Mexican, but Hemingway is one of the most important writers not only from the US, but from the entire world. If that doesn't ring a bell, Moralists, you can go away to Gilligan's island. This is a biopic of an absolute admirable man, who could be like millions of others, like I just have said. Instead, he left a literary corpus that still is one of the American true treasures of their literary history, someone that can make you feel proud to be part of his nation, proud as human being, and also proud of reading him and find someone extraordinary, and not a poor drunk failure who liked to kiss cows and chickens in a remote farm.
If you like that, be my guest. But before that, please, read his books and if you doesn't end admiring his intelectual stature and his brilliance as a writer, then you don't know to read, and you deserve to live in the Fantasy island. This biopic is a masterpiece, well worth for the men who inspired it.
