Hemingway & Gellhorn: helluva story in a flawed epic

That Martha Gellhorn was Ernest Hemingway’s third wife only begins to tell the story.   Gellhorn’s work as a war correspondent eclipsed Hemingway’s.  She was also the only one of Hemingway’s wives to kick his butt to the curb.  (A year ago, I had a drink at the Key West bar where Gellhorn, according to local lore,  had paid the bartender $20 to introduce her to Hemingway.)  In HBO’s  Hemingway & Gellhorn, Gellhorn is played by Nicole Kidman and Hemingway by Clive Owen.

Gellhorn once said, “We were good in war. When there was no war, we made our own.”  She’s a prototype of a liberated woman and he’s an unreconstructed alpha male preoccupied with machismo, so things are not destined to end well.  (Thought:  maybe if Hemingway hadn’t thought so much about masculinity, his own masculinity would have been less selfish.)

Theirs is a helluva story, and the movie is an epic.  As the story sweeps across the Spanish Civil War, the Soviet invasion of Finland,  the liberation of China and D-Day, the  2 1/2 hours goes pretty quickly.

Hemingway & Gellhorn is directed by the great Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff,  Invasion of the Body Snatchers,  The Unbearable Lightness of Being). He keeps Hemingway & Gellhorn shifting from color to sepia to black and white, seamlessly mixing in actual historical footage and inserting the characters Zelig-like into the documentary stock.

Kaufman lives in the Bay Area and shot Hemingway & Gellhorn’s Key West, Havana, Carnegie Hall, Finland, Germany and Spain scenes in San Francisco, San Rafael, Livermore and Oakland.

I enjoyed seeing it once, but it’s definitely not a “can’t miss”, and I’m having difficulty putting my finger on why that is.  My guess is that the screenplay lingers on the Spanish Civil War a little too long and then brings on Hemingway’s dissolute period too abruptly.  The acting and the direction are just fine.