Hemingway

The director Bernhard Sinkel made this excellent mini-series about Hemingway as long ago as 1988, and in 2003 it was finally made available on DVD, but it deserves to be much more widely known. Stacy Keach delivers a magnificent tour de force performance as Hemingway, and carries the entire series with power and conviction, satisfactorily making the transition from a virile young man to an old man suffering from no less than five brain concussions. (The makeup is superb, or this would not have worked.) It is amazing how much money was spent on this series, as extensive location shooting took place everywhere that was important in Hemingway's life. The series concentrates on Hemingway's troubled emotional life, with vivid and searing portraits of his relationships with his four successive wives. Hadley is well portrayed by Josephine Chaplin, with sweetness and devotion, and a helpless resignation to being left by him. It is a pity that Josephine ceased acting many years ago. The most riveting portrayal of a wife is by Marisa Berenson, as the predatory Pauline Pfeiffer. Although, from what Morley Callaghan tells us, Pauline was colder, less sympathetic, and more relentless than Berenson's version, this performance is so powerful and gripping that it is one of the highlights of the series. Lisa Banes is splendid as Martha Gelhorn, the independent and ruthless third wife who dumped her trophy husband when it suited her. Finally, Pamela Reed as the devoted fourth wife Mary Welsh brings just the right delicate touch to her role. There is a very powerful brief supporting performance by Ana Torent as Adriana, a girl Hemingway falls for in Venice. This series has endeavoured conscientiously to be as faithful as it could to the truth of events, which is a tall order! The first part in Paris and Spain goes out of its way to be fair to Harold Loeb (well played by Jerry di Giacomo), having clearly drawn on his memoir giving the truth about 'The Sun Also Rises'. Kitty Canell is well played by Consuelo de Haviland, and Pat Guthrie by Richard de Burnchurch (exactly as one would have imagined him). Fiona Fullerton does moderately well as Lady Duff Twysden (whose name is mispronounced however), though no actress could be expected in a mere cameo to capture the real Duff sufficiently. Dudley Sutton and James Villiers provide particularly good support as minor characters. The only person in the story whom I knew personally was Ezra Pound, and he is portrayed completely wrong by Geoffrey Carey, which was very bad casting, and anyway he was only on film for less than a minute, so no care was taken over it. Sylvia Beach's Bookshop in Paris is lovingly recreated, which was quite a feat. Tremendous effort went into this eminently successful series, which cannot be recommended highly enough for its quality and accuracy. I was very sad at seeing the scenes in the Mayo Clinic near the end, realizing that I was one of the last people Hemingway ever wrote a letter to (from there), and appreciating only now just how much that brief letter to a schoolboy must have cost him in effort, and just how deeply it represented all that was good, brave, and noble about that deeply troubled man tormented all his life by his demons, but retaining his core of honesty and generosity of spirit.

"Hemmingway" is a typical biopic with a very generic feel. Keach carries this flick on his back and his worthy costars work hard as well. However, the film never seems to dig into the psyche of the enigmatic, robust, large-living author but presents him as a two dimensional character who is all too pat. Scripted, stagey, and with the melodramatic feel of a 40's film, "Hemmingway" tells the story but can't seem to shake it's stiffness. In one scene, for example, during the Spanish Civil War, bullets crash through the window of Hem's lover's hotel room. Shaken, she gets out of bed and obviously kills time waiting for Hem to arrive. When he bolts through the door they stand right in the line of fire and embrace while we sit knowing all to well if it wasn't a movie they'd be long gone to safety. And so it goes from scene to scene, contrived and cued and missing many opportunities to show us such things as his plane crashes, his car wreck, his sub hunting, Nobel and Pulitzer benchmarks, etc. while spending it's time jumping from Paris to Pamplona to Africa to Key West to Cuba, etc. and from wife to lover to wife to lover...etc. And okay watch for those who want to learn something about Hemmingway via film even though more can be learned about the man with much less time simply by surfing the web. As for entertainment value, this one is marginal. (C+)

I have to agree with the previous statement: this "biopic" is far less about Ernest Hemingway's life as an adventurer, writer and novelist as it is about his various romances and his penchant for booze. I missed the original and, finally finding the DVD, was very disappointed at the portrayal of a classic writer as nothing more than a modern Cassanova. The acting is fine at points, it touches at various points and no doubt great lengths were taken to film at "original" locals...but the entire plot is bogged down by a series of romances while the director obviously missed the point: Hemingway was his own man, and was never ruled by women. Maybe that didn't cut it in the "Politically Correct" eighties, but this mini series is a rotten tomato.

Stacey Keach does a fine job as Ernest Hemingway, much better than Clive Owen in the recent "Hemingway and Gelhorn." Owen looked and sounded like Groucho Marx. Keach, on the other hand, is a believable character. He's a soft spoken braggart but not a feminist stereotype. He doesn't want to keep women down. He just wants to bed them until he's a little bored with them, then he wants to go out and play with the boys and girls outside. The only time he actively resents his wives -- and there were four of them -- is when they try to clean him up. His last wife, Mary, screeches at one point about his drinking, his crummy friends, and the filth. It reminded me of my marriage.

I mention the wives and girl friends because they seem to constitute the core of the writer's and the director's attention. They come at you seriatim. In addition to the courtesans there is even one terribly young Italian girl in whom he takes a paternal interest, but he never gets his hands on her -- as far as we can tell.

Hemingway was an incredible fellow. There were three main parts to his life: (1) the writing, (2) the romances, and (3) the adventures. This series seems to assume the romances were at the heart of it all. Granted, not everyone gets to have four wives, but it's by no means certain he'd have had so many women anxious to marry him if the other two parts of his life didn't glow and explode like the lights on the Las Vegan strip.

The movie paints every wife as sincere, loving, caring, accommodating, while Carlos Baker's biography suggests some were pretty full of guile, particularly the second wife, Pauline, who carefully insinuated herself into Hemingway's activities by first becoming a friend of wife number one, Hadley. But enough of the soap opera.

The adventures and perigrinations of Hemingway are nicely suggested with locations apparently shot in London, Paris, the American West, somewhere in Florida, and Africa. I'm guessing, but the settings were convincing enough for me. And there is a sufficiency of hunting and fishing, so we get to know something about that part of his life style.

What the series is a little weak on is Hemingway's vanity. The character we get to see is confident and dignified -- but Hemingway was more than that. He was introduced to John Steinbeck in a New York bar. Steinbeck showed him an ancient, brittle blackthorn walking stick. Hemingway scoffed at it and broke it over his own head, according to witnesses. Steinbeck was disgusted. That's something a ten-year-old child would do. There's nothing of that in the character as written. What we see is the Hemingway who was charming, even to homosexuals like Tennessee Williams. We see a Hemingway who decks a guy with one blow of his bare fist. We don't get to see the Hemingway who got his ass kicked in a boxing ring while F. Scott Fitzgerald sat frozen at the bell. We don't get to see F. Scott Fitzgerald, for that matter. We do get to see Ezra Pound for about one second.

These guys are important too, because, after all, they are writers who were in one way or another influential in Hemingway's career. But the writing, of which Hemingway was made, hardly shows up. We hear that he dedicated a book "with love" to Mary -- but we don't learn the title of the BOOK. A mention is made in passing of Hemingway's plan to write a story of a very old Cuban fisherman and a big marlin. That's it -- period. We hear two novels mentioned in the dialog: "The Sun Also Rises" and "For Whom The Bell Tolls." Oh, and one short story, "Up In Michigan." We have hardly an inkling of why they were popular and nothing is said of his flops. The Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes are covered in an offhand remark.

I don't mean to carry on about this neglect of Hemingway's career, and much less do I want to object to any minor license taken with historical fact. But, when you come right down to it, nobody would ever have heard of Ernest Hemingway if, instead of becoming a writer, he was a bank teller or even a doctor in Oak Park, Illinois.

It's not all serious soap opera though. There are one or two amusing scenes -- not as many as Hemingway's sense of humor would have justified -- but I had to laugh when, drunk outside a Paris café, he struggles out of his jacket and, like a matador, challenges a taxi to charge him. And, again, when Stacy Keach is shot from behind while climbing a wall, I'd always thought of Hemingway as beefy but never as being quite so broad of beam but I could believe it.

All in all, it's a worthwhile shot at capturing some part of the life of one of our more popular and talented writers. There is no one like him today.