newjerseynewsroom.com

BY GINA G. SCALA

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

COMMENTARY

"Never go on trips with anyone you do not love," Ernest Hemingway once wrote.

Looks like Hemingway took his own advice when he married third-wife Martha Gellhorn, an American novelist, travel writer and journalist. They met in 1936 Key West, when Hemingway was still married to second wife Pauline Pfeiffer, a fashion editor for Vogue magazine in Paris. They married in 1940; were shoulder-to-shoulder in Spain, China, New York, Key West and Cuba; only to be divorced in 1944.

If you believe what you read, Hemingway threw Martha over because he couldn't stand that she had brains and bravery to boot--that she had too much of the "grace under pressure" she'd learned by his side in the Spanish Civil War, Paula McClain wrote for the Huffington Post recently.

All of this is documented in the new HBO movie “Hemingway and Gellhorn,” which premiered Monday. But according to some critics, the fire that ignited when Hemingway and Gellhorn met at Sloppy Joes doesn’t necessarily translate well on the small screen, even with Australian Nicole Kidman and English actor Clive Owen playing the leads.

“On paper, it has both the sweep and the heroic milieu,” according to the New York Times review of the movie. “Unfortunately, 'Hemingway & Gellhorn' is neither intimate nor epic. It’s a disheartening misfire: a big, bland historical melodrama built on platitudes about honor and the writing life that crams in actual figures and incidents but does little to illuminate them, or to make us care about the romance at its center.”

While based on real life, through research, the film is “never quite believable, either as history or drama,” Los Angeles Times critic Robert Lloyd wrote.

He continued, “From the moment young writer Martha, 28, sidles up to the celebrated Ernest, a decade older and covered in marlin blood, at a Key West bar, we never really lose the sense that we're in a movie, in the company of play actors, not of people.”

 Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly doesn’t agree.

“For a two-and-a-half-hours-plus biopic, it was maddeningly, irresistibly watchable. Every time I thought I was going to throw in the towel,” he wrote, “the film simply took off in a fresh direction and I was hooked all over again.”

When movie characters are based on larger than life people, like Hemingway, it’s never easy to capture their complexity on screen, large or small. In this case, reaction to the movie seems to be more subjective than ever. Hemingway is a lot like cilantro--you either love him or you don’t.

If you love Hemingway, this movie could be for you, or it could be a big disappointment. It depends on whether you want a “real-life” portrait of Hemingway or to honor the myth he remains.