Across the River and Into the Trees

From the perspective of great literature, Venice is the city to go when death is near. In fact, Hemingway’s Venetian novel is often compared to the classic Thomas Mann novella. Both focus on dying men who spend their final days pondering a younger beauty. In Hemingway’s novel, Col. Richard Cantwell is more directly involved with the young and noble-born Renata Contari. In this adaptation, their relationship is less romantic and therefore arguably healthier. Unfortunately, his heart is just as weak in Paula Ortiz’s adaptation of Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees, which releases this Friday on VOD.

Col. Cantwell must be a difficult patient, considering he refuses to follow the advice of Danny Huston (playing his doctor, Captain Wes O’Neil). He insists on taking a duck-hunting trip outside Venice, so the best O’Neil can do is assign him a driver, Sgt. Jackson. Despite the grief he takes, the NCO still appreciates a veteran battlefield officer like Cantwell.

For his part, Cantwell most certainly appreciates a woman like Contari, despite his grim state of mind. Their paths just keep crossing, maybe not so accidentally. It was coincidence that Cantwell had hoped to buy a set of vintage hunting rifles from her cash-poor, but too proud to be cooperative mother. After that, it is largely sympathetic attraction, and perhaps Contari’s passive-aggressive hope to undermine her arranged marriage. She is betrothed to an old family friend, but he is not half the man battle-scarred Cantwell is.

It is pretty easy to guess Cantwell’s real business in Venice, especially if you have any familiarity with Hemingway’s life and work. Nonetheless, the world-weary officer also hopes to conclude another piece of unfinished business, by uncovering the mass burial site of a group of partisans executed by the SS, for distinctly personal reasons.

Ortiz and screenwriter Peter Flannery definitely scrubbed Hemingway’s novel for contemporary viewers. They water down Cantwell’s romance with Contari to essentially a platonic friendship, with close dancing and maybe one or two kisses. They also completely expurgate all references to Stonewall Jackson, from whom the title came.

However, Hemingway readers will appreciate the way Flannery reliably recreates the cadences of his dialogue. This is also an appropriately boozy and smoky film. Ortiz seems to take inspiration from The Third Man, nearly transmuting Hemingway into film noir, in much the same tradition as Robert Siodmak and Don Siegel’s adaptations of “The Killers.”

It works pretty well, especially considering how fully Ortiz and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe capitalize on the Venice locations. Of course, it greatly helps that we can only see and not smell the dank Italian cultural capitol.

Ken Burns does Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway synthesized war and alcohol into great literature better than anyone else. It didn’t work so well for his relationships. Yet, the multiple marriages became part of his troubled artist mystique. Decades before the rise of social media, Hemingway became the ultimate celebrity novelist. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick examine the man through his life, literature and carefully cultivated public image in the three-part Hemingway, which premieres Monday on PBS.

Documenting Hemingway’s life and work really requires nearly six hours, because he had so many distinct periods that directly inspired novels and stories. There was his Michigan youth, WWI, Paris, Spain and bullfighting, hunting in Africa, the Spanish Civil War, WWII, Cuba, and his late career struggles with depression and writers’ block. Burns and Novick take them in order, making for a slow start in part one (“A Writer 1899-1929”), with his early years and the Nick Adams stories they inspired.

Things pick up with WWI and Hadley in Paris. However, the sequences covering the Spanish Civil War in part two (“The Avatar 1929-1944”) are by far the best of the series. Burns and company fully explore the tension between Hemingway’s own libertarian inclinations and his sympathy for the Loyalist cause. They also clearly establish the degree to which Stalin dominated and eventually purged the Republican ranks. Hemingway’s resulting break with the disillusioned John Dos Passos is duly covered, as well as the self-censorship of his journalism. Yet, he also gets deserved credit for the brutal honesty of For Whom the Bell Tolls and the massacre of a Franco-supporting village it so vividly depicts.

None other than the late, great Sen. John McCain testifies to the greatness of Bell, which is an unexpected treat. Weirdly, though, the late A.E. Hotchner (probably Hemingway’s closest living friend at the time of filming) is only heard from briefly, discussing the writer’s sad final days in part three (“The Blank Page 1944-1961). Only one family member participates (on-camera), but it is a significant one: Hemingway’s surviving son, Patrick. Unfortunately, notable biographers like Carlos Baker are long gone, but it is interesting to hear the often diametrically opposed judgments of novelists Mario Vargas Llosa and Edna O’Brien.

Genius: Maxwell Perkins Edits Thomas Wolfe

Maxwell Perkins fostered the development of Twentieth Century American literature like no other, as the editor of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Dawn Powell, and James Jones. He always made his p&l’s editing Taylor Caldwell, but the “Perkin’s touch” also guided his literary luminaries to bestseller status. Perhaps none of Perkins’ bestsellers were as unlikely as Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel and of Time and the River, nor were any of his other professional dealings as tempestuous as those with the Southern Modernist. Their storied editor-author, surrogate father-and-son relationship is dramatized in Michael Grandage’s Genius (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

The Great Depression is in its early days, but Perkins’ world remains untouched. He lines edits during the day at the prestigious publishing house Charles Scribner’s Sons, returning to his quiet home outside the City in the evenings. Thomas Wolfe hardly seems to have noticed the current state of affairs either. The garrulous writer seems to live in his own little world, financially maintained by his formerly married lover, Aline Bernstein. Thanks to her support, he has completed an intimidatingly long manuscript that has been rejected by nearly every house in New York—but not Scribner’s.

Much to everyone’s surprise, Perkins agrees to buy what was then known as O Lost, but he insists Wolfe trim some of its girth. The novelist is amenable in principle, but he will fight for every phrase and passage. It will be a difficult editorial process, but it yields Look Homeward, Angel—and the rest is history. While still enjoying the success of his first novel, Wolfe delivers his second, the even more ambitious and unruly Of Time and the River, which will make the editorial give-and-take for his first book look like child’s play.

It looks somewhat odd to see the definitive American book editor and three of the greatest American novelists of the Modern era played by three Brits and an Australian, but at least that spares us the spectacle of little Leo DiCaprio trying to fill Hemingway’s shoes or Ryan Gosling moping about as Fitzgerald. First and foremost, Colin Firth has the perfect urbane sophistication and Ivy League reserve for the patrician Perkins. Jude Law can get a bit theatrical as Wolfe, but the novelist’s Walt Whitman expansiveness is hard resist unleashing. Regardless, he develops some nice master-apprentice chemistry with Firth.

Dominic West clearly has a blast chewing the scenery in his brief appearance as Papa Hemingway, but it is Guy Pearce who really gives the film some tragic heft as the Zelda and alcoholism afflicted Fitzgerald. Similarly, Nicole Kidman’s complex portrayal of the difficult, desperately possessive, but not unsympathetic Rubenstein will probably be overlooked or unfairly discounted. However, Laura Linney is grossly under-employed as Louise Perkins.

Screenwriter John Logan’s adaptation of A. Scott Berg’s biography, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius actually shows an understanding of how the book business worked in the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike The Girl in the Book, there are no misuses of publishing jargon to make industry professionals wince. It is also a classy period production that even includes an era appropriate jazz club sequence, featuring appropriately swinging Jools Holland Big Band sidemen (Kenji Fenton, Winston Rollins, and Chris Storr).

Frankly, it is just refreshing to see a film that believes Wolfe’s prose is worthy of feature treatment. It is a highly literate film that respects American culture and the circumstances that shaped it. Recommended with affection for those who admire and re-read Perkins’ stable of authors, Genius opens this Friday (6/10) in New York.

Running from Crazy: The Hemingways

If when asked who is the most interesting member of the Hemingway family you automatically reply “Mariel” then you must be either Barbara Kopple or Oprah Winfrey. Granted, she was terrific in Manhattan and has dealt with more family heartbreak than anyone should ever have to face.  However, Kopple proves her larger than life grandfather Ernest and tragic sister Margaux are far more compelling figures in the self-helpy documentary Running from Crazy (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York, via the OWN documentary distribution arm.

Seven members of Hemingway’s family committed suicide.  Mariel Hemingway never knew her grandfather, but she always had an extremely complicated relationship with Margaux, the middle sister.  Probably the film’s strongest sequences chart Margaux Hemingway’s spectacular rise to fame as a supermodel and her frustrations with an acting career that never really took off.  Her big break was supposed to be Lipstick, in which she had Mariel fittingly cast as her as her younger sister.  When the film came out, all the good notices went to one sister and the bad notices went to the other.

Frankly, if you were not old enough to remember the Studio 54 era, most of the footage of Margaux as a media sensation will come as a revelation.  In contrast, all we get of Papa is the same old stock footage.  There is plenty of Mariel though.  Kopple follows her to benefits and awareness marches, as part of her ongoing efforts to de-stigmatize mental illness and support those who have also lost loved ones to suicide.  Such dedication is admirable, but it does not make great cinema.

Beyond her well intentioned outreach, Running includes far too much self-actualizing mumbo jumbo.  In fact, Hemingway and her partner Bobby Williams seem to have some sort of New Age lifestyle joint venture, but it is impossible to tell what exactly they are selling, even though we hear plenty of his pitch.

If nothing else, Running will convince viewers under no circumstances would they want to take a rock-climbing road trip with Hemingway and Williams. It would be better to be the dude in 127 Hours.  There is absolutely no reason to force viewers to sit through all their bickering and bantering, but Kopple does so anyway.

Still, the archival scenes of Margaux Hemingway, including footage she shot for a prospective documentary on her grandfather, are truly compelling.  Especially haunting are the interviews she granted ostensibly to trumpet her successful rehab efforts, but look so clearly like cries for help in retrospect.  Mariel Hemingway kind of admits she missed the warning signs, but Kopple never pushes her on this or any other issue.  As a result, the film often has the vibe of an infomercial for group hugs. 

There are moments to Kopple’s starry-eyed film, but it is a disappointment by most cinematic and journalistic standards.  Not recommended in theaters, interested readers should note Running from Crazy will air on OWN next year, which is where it belongs.  Regardless, it opens this Friday (11/1) in New York at the Angelika Film Center.

Hemingway & Gellhorn: Papa Met His Match

Ernest Hemingway deliberately cultivated his notoriously macho image.  Yet, he somehow he found four women willing to marry him at various points of his life.  That was a lot of optimism, on everyone’s part.  Though she had the shortest tenure as a “Mrs. Hemingway,” war correspondent Martha Gellhorn was the most notable.  Matching and at times surpassing his feats of war zone journalistic daring, Gellhorn fired his passion and inspired his professional respect and jealousy.  Their tempestuous relationship is dramatized in Philip Kaufman’s HBO Film Hemingway & Gellhorn (trailer here) now currently airing on the network.

When ambitious young magazine writer Martha Gellhorn first meets the funky, grungy Hemingway in a Key West bar, they can barely resist tearing the clothes off each other.  The fact that he is married hardly matters to either of them.  However, their animal attraction will have to briefly wait until they reunite covering the Spanish Civil War, at the behest of ardent Spanish Republican supporter John Dos Passos.

Working with Dutch Communist documentarian-propagandist Joris Ivens, Hemingway and Dos Passos film The Spanish Earth (with Gellhorn tagging along), for the purpose of rallying American audiences to the Republican cause.  Frankly, it is considerable more compelling to watch their run-and-gun shooting process in H&G than the historical documentary itself.  That adrenaline also fuels the war reporters’ torrid affair.

Just like Hemingway and Gellhorn’s relationship, the film really clicks during their time together in Spain.  Viewers are served a liberal helping of Nationalist atrocities, but the portrayal of the Soviet forces is also refreshingly unvarnished, particularly with respects to fatal purging of heroic Loyalist soldier Paco Zarra, a stand-in for Dos Passos’ doomed friend José Robles.  While the literary power couple is shown fawning over Chou En-lai and sneering at the gauche Chiangs in China, Gellhorn also reports from Finland, unequivocally siding with the Finns against the Soviet invaders.

Unfortunately, the film loses vitality with the aging Hemingway, sliding into the long denouement of his dubious u-boat chasing Cuban years and sad final days in Idaho.  By the time America enters WWII, screenwriters Jerry Stahl and Barbara Turner clearly suggest Gellhorn was more of a man than Hemingway.  Of course, this is a common problem with bio-pics.  To be accurate, they can almost never end with the good stuff.

Regardless of his character arc, Clive Owen totally goes for broke as Hemingway.  One of the few actors working today who can come across as both manly and literate, he bellows and carouses with relish.  It is a larger than life performance, bordering on camp, yet he is still able to convey Hemingway’s inner demons and nagging self-doubts.  He also manages to dial it down periodically for some saucy Tracy-and-Hepburn bantering with Nicole Kidman’s Gellhorn.  Likewise, Kidman is on a very short list of actresses who can play smart, sophisticated, and alluring, simultaneously.  In fact, she could be channeling Hepburn and the Rosalind Russell of His Girl Friday as the fast-talking, khaki-wearing journalist crusading against injustice, which is frankly pretty cool.

In addition to the strong chemistry between the leads, H&G boasts a strong supporting ensemble.  David Strathairn is particularly engaging as the disillusioned idealist, Dos Passos, serving as a subtle corrective to Hemingway’s ethical malleability.  Metallica’s Lars Ulrich adds notable color as Ivens, while Tony Shaloub conveys a sense of both the menace and tragedy of the Stalinist true believer Mikhal Koltsov, who is considered to be the source for the Karkov character in For Whom the Bell Tolls.  Again, the most inspired work comes during or prior to the Spanish Civil War sequences.

Frequently approximating the look of black-and-white news reels and Ivens’ documentary footage, H&G is highly cinematic (getting a vital assist from cinematographer Rogier Stoffers).  Kaufman is a big canvas filmmaker, with sufficient artistic stature to merit a recent MoMA film retrospective—a high honor indeed.  While steamier and gossipier than The Right Stuff, it is downright staid compared to his Henry & June and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 

An appropriately messy film sprawling all over the place, H&G is rather rowdily entertaining, capturing good deal more historical insight than one would expect.  Definitely recommended for those who appreciate the Hemingway oeuvre and persona (as well admirers of Gellhorn or Dos Passos), Hemingway & Gellhorn airs again on HBO June 2^nd, 7^th, 10^th, 11^th, 15^th, and 19^th and on HBO2 on June 4^th, 6^th, 12^th, 17^th, 21^st, 25^th, and 30^th.

Hemingway’s Garden of Eden

Those old school writers loved their liquor. However, it is not the alcohol that undermines a promising Jazz Age writer’s recent marriage. It is his wife psychological gamesmanship. Still, the Bournes’ lost honeymoon looks like a sundrenched paradise in Hemingway’s Garden of Eden (trailer here), John Irvin’s adaptation of the controversial unfinished novel, which opens this Friday in New York.

After serving in WWI, David Bourne became an expatriate, finding his voice in Europe as a writer. Indeed, the autobiographical elements of Garden are inescapable, but there appear to be generous amounts of wish fulfillment as well. Enter Catherine, his wealthy young bride. At first, she seems content whiling away their time with drink and passion, but her dark side gradually starts to manifest itself, triggered by Bourne’s rededication to his writing.

At first, she simply boozes harder than he does and suggests some rather eyebrow-raising role playing. Yet, as he works on a Nick Adams-like story set in his beloved Africa, the new Mrs. Bourne resorts to the shocking, introducing another woman into their love nest. Dark and sultry, it is unclear what the mysterious Marita makes of the American couple, or which of the two she prefers.

Many questioned the extent to which the sexually charged Garden was edited at the time of its posthumous publication, making the ultimate faithfulness of James Scott Linville’s adapted screenplay a rather complicated matter to judge. Nevertheless, his dialogue nicely captures the ring of Hemingway’s novels.

Jack Huston (grandson of the Hemingway-esque director John), is surprisingly on target as David Bourne, largely modeling him on the author, with good reason. Though a tricky part, he finds the right balance between Bourne’s devil-may-care expat persona and his buried insecurities. Frankly, Catarina Murino is mostly just required to smolder on screen, but she certainly does it well. Even though American Beauty’s Mena Suvari is all over the place as Catherine Bourne, she still acquits herself better than one might suspect. The real casting mistake though, comes with Matthew Modine’s appearances as Bourne’s supposedly grizzled big game hunting father in several flashback scenes. Still, the always entertaining Richard E. Grant helps to compensate, chewing the scenery with élan as Bourne’s former commander, Colonel Boyle.

Ashley Rowe’s artful cinematography captures indolent beauty of the French and Spanish Riviera, giving Garden a seductive La Dolce Vita ambience. It goes a long way. Despite the self-consciously naughty nature of its love triangle, it still pulls viewers in with its lush settings and some sharply penned exchanges. The strangely transfixing Garden opens this Friday (12/10) in New York at the Quad Cinema.

On-Stage: Clothes for a Summer Hotel

She was a former Southern belle who was institutionalized in a mental sanatorium. If Zelda Fitzgerald sounds like a Tennessee Williams heroine, it turns out she eventually was, though many theater patrons are probably unfamiliar with the play in question. The Fitzgeralds and their friends, including fellow Scribner’s author Ernest Hemingway, continue to haunt and torment each other in Williams’s “ghost play,” Clothes for a Summer Hotel, the playwright’s final Broadway production which the White Theatre Company has revived in a staging now running at the Hudson Guild Theatre.

In retrospect, it seems bizarre that Hotel closed on Broadway in 1980 after only fifteen performances. How often did jaded New Yorkers have an opportunity to see the late Geraldine Page in a new Tennessee Williams play? Though the contemporary reviews were unkind, the play as performed by the White Horse (using a text twice revised by Williams from the original 1980 stage version) contains plenty of meaty Williamseque themes, including love, art, sexuality, and madness.

As Hotel opens, F. Scott Fitzgerald shivers outside the gates of a sanitarium, guarded by two rather severe nuns in what could be a scene out of Kafka. As soon as he heard about his wife’s commitment, he left his Hollywood screenwriting gig in such a hurry he did not pack more appropriate clothes for the chilly East Coast climate. Eventually, Zelda comes out, but it is not exactly a loving reunion. As anyone with a cursory familiarity with twentieth century American literature knows, the Fitzgeralds had a turbulent marriage, giving them plenty of difficult memories to agonize over throughout both acts of Hotel.

Everyone in Hotel is apparently dead, reliving and commenting on key events from the past. (However, F. Scott does not seem to recognize that yet.) Indeed, Williams’s narrative flashes forward and back in time, creating an impressionistic rather than chronological sense of the Fitzgeralds’ lives together. Perhaps not surprisingly though, the highpoint of Hotel comes in a confrontation between Fitzgerald and his frienemy Ernest Hemingway—two hard drinking American writers grappling with professional jealousy and issues of sexuality raised in their work—territory Williams was certainly familiar with.

As the Fitzgeralds, Peter J. Crosby and Kristen Vaughan really project a sense of a couple that has each other’s numbers. They convincingly express the mysterrious affection that somehow kept them together, despite being buried under years of infidelities, betrayals, and public scenes, as well as the myriad of resentments that preclude them from forgiving and forgetting. Making quite an impression in his comparatively limited stage time, Rod Sweitzer is gruff and blustery enough to capture the self-serving vigor of a still youthful Hemingway, without becoming a caricature of the famous author.

Director Cyndy A. Marion nicely stages Hotel’s temporal dislocations, keeping the events and settings clear and distinct. It all has a classy sheen thanks to the evocative incidental music composed by Joe Gianono, (whose arranging credits include work with jazz great Gene Bertoncini).

It is amazing how rewarding it is to revisit Tennessee Williams’s “flops.” Based on the White Horse revival, Hotel clearly seems like a play that deserved a better fate. Though its non-linear structure is relatively challenging compared to most of the Williams canon, its subjects—Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald—would seem to have an enduring commercial appeal, making it a shrewd choice to restage. It is a literate, well mounted production, definitely worth checking out. Now officially open, Hotel runs at the Hudson Guild Theatre through February 21st, with a special post-show Williams panel discussion scheduled to follow the February 14th performance.

(Photo: Joe Bly)

Papa Spain

Taking a day off in the City? Check out two vintage Spanish Civil War docs playing afternoons this week at the MoMA. You can come late too.

The first feature is Joris Ivens’s The Spanish Earth, best remembered for the commentary and narration by Ernest Hemingway. It takes it name from the arid stretch of land that might feed the embattled Madrid if brave Republican farmers can finish their irrigation project. Evidently, this is the plain in Spain where it never rains. Hemingway tells viewers “we” have always wanted to irrigate the land but “they” would not allow it.

Despite its reputation, Earth does not hold up well. Ivens, a recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize, was a doctrinaire Communist. For all the talk of human dignity in Earth, Ivens had no qualms about whitewashing slave labor when filming a documentary about a Soviet construction behemoth in 1931. Frankly, his visuals here are not particularly strong. While always completely earnest, many his scenes of peasants marching through the rocky fields cry out for Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot, as they resemble the technical films MST3K used to send-up.

Earth fails precisely for the reasons the writings on the same war by Orwell and Hemingway himself are timeless. Their books capture the chaos and ambiguity of the Civil War, with its frustrating in-fighting between the Communists and anarchists, and the atrocities committed by both sides, including the Republicans, especially against the Church (which is conspicuously absent in Earth). Frankly, the film is not particularly effective as propaganda either, employing class warfare rhetoric and a grating score by longtime Communist Marc Blitzstein (when trying to generate Spanish sympathy, why not try some flamenco?).

Conversely, Return to Life from celebrated photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and leftist director Herbert Kline is much more successful, both as film and propaganda. As would be expected, it is visually much more striking, and the soundtrack effectively uses traditional Spanish folk music. Convincingly describing the war in terms of democracy under attack and focusing on the Republican medical corps, Return is essentially a Why We Fight for the Loyalist cause.

Interestingly, both films mention in passing the Moorish legions fighting with Franco’s Royalists and Mussolini’s fascists. It was a little remarked upon early case of cooperation between Islamists and fascists that has continued to develop, as explicated in Barbet Schroeder’s documentary Terror’s Advocate.

Earth has historical significance largely as vehicle to hear Hemingway’s voice. His words about the “good fight” are far richer in For Whom the Bell Tolls and his short stories. While it was certainly also produced for propaganda purposes, Return is a very watchable film, continuing to serve the historic interests of the Republican cause. Both films screen together at MoMA today and tomorrow.