Movie Review: Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012)... A Moveable Flop

"I do not see myself as a footnote to someone else's life." —Nicole Kidman as Martha Gellhorn in the movie, Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012)

So I finally got around to watching the made-for-TV HBO movie, Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012), starring Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen, which tells the tale of the steamy exciting relationship between our hero Ernest Hemingway and his third (third time's a charm, right?) and arguably most interesting wife, Martha Gellhorn. Though in no way a Spanish movie, I thought I'd review it for you here given that it treats this blog's patron saint and his time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and because I've noticed a lot more Hemingway-search-related traffic on my site these past two weeks. (Why the sudden rising interest in EH?) Besides, you always have to ask, what motivates the making of a movie like this, what kinds of stereotypes images of the author or of Spain will it (re)produce, and perhaps most importantly, what kind of audience does it think it is reaching? As I sat down to watch the movie last week, these were the kinds of questions swirling through my mind.

The opening shock impact that I felt from the first scene with EH in many ways serves as a metaphor for the film's many challenges and shortcomings. Me and my wife's first impression of Clive Owen, with mustache catching a swordfish near Key West, was that he looked more like Groucho Marx than Hemingway. Which reminded me what is always the biggest problem biopics face when depicting iconic figures: the audience's expectations about the actual historical figure, a film's competition with the person's many other existing popular depictions, almost invariably leads to the audience's disappointment when the film does not live up to that long shadow cast in this case by America's most famous expat in Spain. (This doesn't always doom biopics. I like My Week With Marilyn (2011), and Monroe is surely an even more treacherous subject to tackle than EH. But everyone has to admit that the first thing you wonder upon seeing Michelle Williams is whether she's going to be able to pull off the Monroe look.) Putting first impressions aside, from that moment forward I was self-conscious that this would be a movie trying too hard to invoke (or escape) the legend of Hemingway, and it might stretch the limits of good storytelling or good cinema in its efforts to squeeze in those images of Don Ernesto that it thinks its audience wants or needs.

This image of the actual Hemingway and Gellhorn
nicely captures what must have been their
powerful, larger-than-life characters.

The acting was not bad. Kidman and Owen did a fair job playing their parts, and yet despite this somehow there was no real energy or chemistry between the two. In the scene where the two characters meet, snappy banter is meant to convince us there is chemistry, but it is oddly paced and the lines are not that snappy. For example, I introduce you to the world's wimpiest line: "Papa doesn't want you to go," says EH to MG in the middle of movie at a critical juncture in their relationship. It is pretty clear what Nicole Kidman's motives were for doing the movie. She got to play the part of a strong, adventurous and charismatic woman. If the movie succeeds at one thing, it is letting us know that one of Hemingway's wives was actually really quite an interesting person in her own right. Kidman's acting doesn't exactly detract from that, but I found myself wishing I could see Gellhorn play Gellhorn, and not some Hollywood superstar. We get to see old Gellhorn, and thus an old Kidman, which is always an interesting make-up accomplishment (how to reverse the reversal of botox); but Kidman's old-Gellhorn voice, low, monotonous and soft, which narrates the movie,  is noticeably affected and becomes kind of irritating.

The other problem was that we only really get to see Gellhorn in counterpoint to Hemingway. (Okay, so there was no false-advertising here.) And Clive Owen interprets Hemingway, at this point in his life already a celebrity, as bombastic, childish, and overly obsessed with his manhood. If they were a comic duo, Gellhorn would be the straight man to Hemingway's more dynamic, larger-than-life persona. But this is a love story... or wait, is it a biographical story? And who's the protagonist again? Throughout the movie you see the irresistible story of Hemingway interpolate itself into the scenes of what is framed and billed as a story about both of them... We see EH big sea fishing (Old Man and the Sea, anyone?), we see the Spanish Civil War years (more on this below), and they can't resist showing us EH's suicide (and foreshadowing the hell out of it throughout the film) even though he had long left Gellhorn by then. At some points it seems like Owen and the scriptwriters forget what the movie is about, and feel obliged to deliver us an argument specifically about Hemingway... but they never do. I was wondering if the movie would be a critique of Hemingway: he's not the great man, but really an arrogant, pompous chauvinist. But they never really go there either. Fans of Hemingway will be annoyed by how childish EH is here, while critics will be annoyed that the movie never dots the "i" in the feminist critique of him.

But let us not forget that this is a historical drama, and not just a love story. Certainly the director (Philip Kaufman) of the film wouldn't let us forget it. H&G is a movie where the grand events of history through which the characters pass are meant to move you. This endeavor also feels uneven at times and falls flat at others. The movie can't resist historical cameos (did he just say "Orson Welles"?), literally bomb-bastic war scenes, and the obligatory imagery of a Dachau holocaust camp at the end of WWII (which comes across as an out-of-kilter somber moment thrown in to oblige and to disturb). New film techniques are used to nest the film's stars in actual historical footage. Which frankly comes across a bit sappy. The cinematographer shifts between color (to indicate a lived present) and B&W or sepia tone filters to create a retro film affect. But the transitions are distracting and happen too frequently to be subtle, and there is something about seeing Nicole Kidman in sepia which just seems comical rather than historical.

Get what you pay for: Robert Duvall delivers one of the worst cameos ever,
as a Russian general which was a walking cliché. Though you can't blame him,
since apparently he did the part as a favor to the director.

Here you can see Nicole Kidman (in sepia) asking herself, "How did I end
up here on the Spanish front?" Good question, Nicole. Good question.

Scenes like this, that is county-side trench scenes,
always pepper the Spanish Civil War genre. Irresistible.

However, the application of this technique speaks to the irresistible iconography of  the Spanish Civil War, one of the most photo-documented wars of its time. So sure enough, we get a photographer in the plot to allow the director those irresistible photo homages to the iconic images of the Spanish front and heroic International Brigade fighters. Want "authentic" wartime music, too? Don't worry! We got that, too! But after this movie, if I don't listen to "Ay Carmela" ever again, I'll live a happy life... as if there weren't dozens of other classic Spanish Civil War songs to mix in. (Maybe they couldn't afford SGAE's rights-of-author charges for them. Or maybe its like all those summer beach clubbing hits here in Spain which guiris love because the title chorus is so easy to remember.) But despite all these filmic love affairs with the Spanish Civil War, and, yes, the hackneyed history theses one-liners (we get Kidman-as-Gellhorn calling it "a dress-rehearsal" for WWII), it is only just a backdrop, a stage for romancing between the two protagonists. In one widely commented upon scene, EH and MG manage to have sex in a hotel building even as it is being bombed apart and they are covered in the ruined dust. Who knew war was such a great aphrodisiac? (In one interview, Kidman tries to pitch this scene as capturing some useful insight into the two historical figures, that they were so intensely passionate that they were even capable of love-making when in mortal danger. Perhaps, but I couldn't help but think the scene makes light of what is the real backstory: Madrid is being bombed and civillians are now dying in their own homes.)

And much could be said about the signature HBO gratuitous sex scenes. And much of it is being said elsewhere. Let's see, what do I want to say? I certainly wouldn't complain about them. (There are three scenes in total.) Do they add much beyond giving us what we secretly want (to see Kidman naked)? Probably not. Unless they are meant to emphasize how kinky the two characters are, since the scene mentioned above and another sex-scene in the changing room of a Cuban cabaret club both have an oddly voyeuristic and kinky feel to them. The sex in these scenes doesn't exactly consumate a growing love between the two characters. (Maybe that is what the third sex scene accomplishes.) Again, I'm not complaining. But I won't pretend (as many others seem to be doing) that it adds much of anything to the story about Hemingway and Gellhorn. (And so much for showing this movie to the kids to encourage them to take an interest in American literature and world history... though perhaps Hemingway is not much of a PG figure anyway.)

Maybe the movie is worth watching just for this totally unnecessary sex scene,
in a Cuban cabaret changing room.

This would be the gratuitous sex scene where EH and MG are actually
consummating feelings of love and closeness to each other, rather than
merely demonstrating to audiences the passion of their personalities.

Whether to watch the movie or not, that's what a review really boils down to. And on this question I'm conflicted. It would be hard for me to recommend this movie on its filmic or entertainment merits alone. I think it was a bit boring, kind of a flop. Still, part of me wonders whether the movie has at least been useful for another injection of Hemingwaymania. While the world hardly needs more Hemingway fanatics, they do less harm than good. (As a Spanish Civil War movie, I'd say it's more farce than tour de force... I would redirect you to the hundreds of Spanish movies that cover that topic with much greater care and consideration. In this movie, the war boils down to the clichéd old-school American account, "You can't trust them Russians," which is a pretty impoverished understanding of all that went on in the war.)

Gellhorn must have been a kick-ass person, what with all
the wars she covered on the front-lines.

But I think the real irony of this movie is summed up by the epigraph I placed at the top of this post, easily the best and most memorable line of the movie. (Probably the line that convinced Kidman to take the part.) Gellhorn, in an interview at the end of her life, complains to the journalist asking her about Hemingway: "I do not see myself as a footnote to someone else's life." Something tells me that a lot of people in Hollywood liked this project because they thought they could breath new life into the conventional story of Don Ernesto by instead focusing on his just-as-fascinating third of four wives. At times it felt as though the movie was meant to be a celebration not of Hemingway _and_ Gellhorn, but really just of the impressiveness and greatness that was Gellhorn. But by the end of the movie, when Kidman-as-Gellhorn utters this line (in one of the few good scenes of the film... probably why this scene appears in every positive review of the movie), nobody is convinced. The line falls flat, because, irony of ironies, this is _not_ Gellhorn: The Movie. She has, in fact, managed to become a footnote, or at best the second-named titled character, to a featured event that is about Hemingway.

And this was the great failure of the movie, it couldn't get it's story straight, and just pick a genre. Was this a "behind every great man, there's a great woman" picture? (As one reviewer put it: "a lot of hooey about Hemingway".) Or was it actually a stealth biopic of Gellhorn, the trailblazing female professional war correspondent, who among her many amazing accomplishments was actually there at Normandy to cover the D-Day invasion? (Is this why the movie aired on Memorial Day?) Or was it a kind of Alexandre Dumas style historical fiction, where the characters' secret love lives crisscross the great moments of history? (We learn, for example, or that is the film implies that Hemingway's _real_ motive for going to cover the Spanish Civil War was _actually_ to pursue Gellhorn.)

In the end it was none, or it was all of them, but none done very coherently or convincingly. So maybe you should pass on this movie and wait for the remake, which I propose be titled: "Not Hemingway's Wife." Now that's a movie about Gellhorn that I'd like to watch.

Don Ernesto: Hemingway's Novels in Spain

So if in the previous entry I gave us a rough introduction to what Hemingway actually saw in Spain, here I want to open a dialogue about Hemingway's literary vision of Spain. One book I've been reading on this subject is Edward Stanton, Hemingway en España (Editorial Castalia, 1989). (Admittedly probably not the best source, but one of the few available to me in Valencia's public library.) This is how I might sum up Stanton's characterization of Don Ernesto: he grew up loving the untamed wilderness of America (think fishing in Michigan with dad) and resenting his overly civilized mother (think forced music lessons). He left America with a deep dissatisfaction with the suburbanization of the West and the effete and insincere 1920s high society.

Spain, and bullfighting in particular, as Hemingway imagined it, was the opposite of these: a sincere, untamed, joyful (as in not cynical), manly (as in, not for "dandies"), humble world. Projecting this image onto the Spain he discovered, Hemingway described it as the place where he should have been born, the place of his spiritual rebirth. And thousands of others have flocked here (and elsewhere) chasing after the myth of this charismatic, adventurous visitor. I'm inclined to call it the "Hemingway Mystique," if you can pardon the pun on Betty Friedan's classic feminist treatise.

On the trail of a great writer, you can find this sign in Pamplona along the route
of the running of the bulls made famous by the Nobel Laureate.

For an excellent critique of Hemingway's vision of Spain, a perspective offered by a Spanish (Basque, no less) historian, Paco Pereda, check out an interview with him in its entirety at this blog. (Many thanks to The Hemingway Project for conducting this interview and posting it online. Your blog project is excellent!) I paste here a sample of the interview, which I think nicely summarizes the limitations of the Hemingway paradigm, even for explaining its central motif, the San Fermín festival and the bullfight:

"[I]t’s difficult for Americans to understand the meaning of bullfighting, but keep in mind that it’s also hard for the Spanish! For most Americans, Hemingway has been a good introduction to bullfighting, but at the same time, this has been problematic. Hemingway likes to exaggerate. He takes Spanish culture to be one huge party. Yes, there are great parties and immense enthusiasm during the bullfights, but the Spanish understand that it’s just an event. It’s not our real life. Well, the natives also tend to exaggerate; it’s normal for people to exaggerate about something they are famous for. The bullfighting situation is really not much different than the way people party and celebrate important sporting events all over the world. There is terrific enthusiasm during the event, but it’s still just a game."

It is my personal experience that these cautionary words apply equally well to all of you study abroad exchange students out there visiting Spain. (I was once one of you.) When you are living in Spain for just a year, your Spain is an extended vacation (culture = museums, travel = exotic locales and fiestas), very different from the reality that many Spaniards live (culture = evening TV and sports, travel = work commute). I think it is hugely suggestive that the title of Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises, was changed in the Spanish translation to Fiesta.

And the Pereda interview continues, offering some insight into the polemics surrounding bullfights and its politics:

"Over the last 100 years ago bullfighting has gone from a popular spectacle followed with devotion to something steeped in controversy and unacceptable to about half the population. Bullfighting has always belonged to the rural world, the conservative and the traditional peoples, the upper classes. Today Spanish society is complex, divided, postmodern, and highly urbanized. Its liberal values repudiate the mentality of risking death and bloody struggle which bullfighting is about. Bullfighting survives today thanks to the traditional sector of society and the tourists. (Hemingway has played a big role in this). Tourists come here in search of a traditional Spain that no longer exists but is prepared for them with nostalgia."

So outsiders should tread lightly when gushing about the cultural "authenticity" of witnessing a Spanish bullfight. Such claims about authenticity carry political implications for _whose_ Spain you subscribe to.

I put some of Hemingway's books to a crude test of central themes: Wordle, an online tool that generates word clouds from the most commonly used words in an inputted text. (Warning: this is a dangerously entertaining tool for us humanities scholars who publish or perish.) Don't worry, it automatically removes certain words like those favorite conjunctions "and" or "but." I've posted a few here for your entertainment.

A word frequency cloud or "wordle" generated by the text of The Sun Also Rises.
What's interesting is how little of Spain or the Hemingway paradigm comes through on this
wordle, until you peer more closely and spot: "bull", "bottle" (presumably wine), square
(presumably translated from plaza), and "fiesta".

 
This said, Hemingway's novels make for impressive prose, so much so that one could argue that they helped redefine Spain even for Spaniards. So here is a starter list of his major works which use Spain as the muse.

Major Works by Hemingway on Spain:

1926             The Sun Also Rises  – This novel is about a group of expats living in Paris,
                     who fit the profile of the "lost generation," that decide to visit Pamplona during
                     the festival of San Fermín. It is loosely autobiographical in that this is
                     precisely how Hemingway came to enjoy the July festivities in the early
                     twenties when he was stationed as a reporter in Paris.
1932             Death in the Afternoon – A nonfiction book about the art, ceremony, and
                     traditions of Spanish bullfighting, using the ritual as a deeper inquiry into 
                     human nature and fear and courage.
1938             The Fifth Column – A lesser known work, this play is set during the Spanish
                     Civil War. Its main significance is that it is a work about the war published
                     while the war was still going on, and the title helped popularize the term
                     "the fifth column," coined by one of Franco's generals Emilio Mola to refer to
                     any clandestine group of people who work from within to help an outside force
                     overthrow a besieged city (in this case the Siege of Madrid).
1940             For Whom the Bell Tolls – Perhaps his most famous work on Spain, this
                     novel is set during the Spanish Civil War, and is also loosely autobiographical
                     in how it tells the story of an American in the International Brigade. A film
                     adaptation, starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, came out in 1943 and
                     was a critical hit, helping to draw further attention to Hemingway's work and 
                     views on Spain.
1952             The Old Man and the Sea – Though not about Spain, the old man in this 
                     classic novel is of Spanish origin, and is likely at least in part inspired by 
                     Hemingway's early journalistic coverage of tuna fishing and Vigo fishermen.
1960 (1985)  The Dangerous Summer – A nonfiction series of articles on bullfighting and 
                     the Pamplona festivities written for Life Magazine, first published as a serial in
                     1960, and later republished as a book in 1985.


I also direct you to the following online materials and websites if you are interested in learning more about Hemingway from those more expert than I on the subject.


Some Official Sites on Hemingway and Biographical Materials:

• University of Delaware, Library: "Ernest Hemingway In His Time: An Exhibition":
http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/exhibits/hemngway/index.htm

• JFK Library, "The Ernest Hemingway Collection":
http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/The-Ernest-Hemingway-Collection.aspx

• The Hemingway Project (blog on the Hemingway mystique)
http://www.thehemingwayproject.com/

• New York Times page on Hemingway, including his famous Civil War dispatches
http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/04/specials/hemingway-dispatches.html

• The Hemingway Society:
http://www.hemingwaysociety.org/

• Enthusiast website on Ernest Hemingway:
http://www.ernest.hemingway.com/

• Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure:
http://www.pbs.org/hemingwayadventure/index.html

• UT Austin Harry Ransom Center, "Ernest Hemingway" Archive Inventory:
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/uthrc/00056/hrc-00056.html/

• Hemingway's Official Page for his 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature (including his acceptance speech):
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/hemingway-bio.html

• The Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum Website:
http://www.hemingwayhome.com/

This word cloud for For Whom the Bell Tolls exhibits some more recognizable stereotype elements:
"gypsy", "horses", "primitivo", and "Don". Lest you worry that these clouds lose the core elements
of the novel's plot, the word "bridge" is sitting there right in the middle. Interesting to note how
the word "man" is twice the size (twice the frequency) as "woman".

Given the limits of my knowledge of Hemingway or his literature, I encourage Books on Spain, The Hemingway Project, and any others to please weigh in and let me know if there is anything I left out or mischaracterized here or in the previous entry.

Thanks!

Don Ernesto: Ernest Hemingway in Spain

So I would be remiss to write a blog titled "Not Hemingway's Spain," intended to correct the "Hemingway paradigm," without occasionally saying something about Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) himself, a.k.a. "Don Ernesto." Hemingway is easily America's most famous expat in Spain. (To all my readers: Are there any other nominees? I'm going to start a series profiling past and present expats in Spain. So I welcome any thoughts!)

Here I'm going to start by just outlining a bit the periods of time that Hemingway spent in Spain… And the first thing I noticed is that I've spent more time in Spain than Hemingway ever did! So why are people reading his books anyway? Clearly they should be reading my blog!

Well, okay joking aside, I know that I am no Hemingway. I _start_ my sentences with "and", rather than stringing together clauses (and page-long sentences!) using Hemingway's favorite conjunction. I certainly haven't mastered his art of precision, his modern minimalist style. (Am I still rambling on about this point?) Still it is significant to observe one glaring fact about Hemingway's obsession with Spain: though he loved the country and the culture, he never really _lived_ here. And even a quick glance at the timeline below of his visits to Spain and the books he wrote reveals an enormous skew towards bullfights and summer vacations, Pamplona and Madrid, with the notable exception of his extended stay in Madrid as a wartime correspondent during the Civil War. This ought to be a red flag to Hemingway fans to tread lightly in drawing too many conclusions about Spain from his travels and writings on the country.

A more light-hearted image of the bull from those usually seen in connection to Hemingway

I'm only very crudely summarizing biographical highlights here, but another significant thing to bear in mind is that Hemingway was not allowed to visit Spain for 15 years of the Franco dictatorship (because of his political sympathies for the other side). This helps explain the gap below between 1938 (one year before the Civil War ended with Franco's victory) and 1953, the year when the Franco government eased up on Hemingway's restriction and he was invited to return to Pamplona to help promote the festivities and bullfighting culture. (Note the intersection of biography and history: 1953 was the same year the Franco regime more broadly eased up on Spanish-US relations, which I mentioned in my entry on the movie ¡Bienvenido Mr. Marshall!.) Though also significant was the fact that starting in 1928 Cuba would compete with Spain for Hemingway's affections.

Hemingway and his second wife Pauline on the San Sebastian beach.
Apparently I was mistaken, Don Ernesto did enjoy Spain's beaches!

And one last important observation: Hemingway's birthday was July 22nd. San Fermín, the festival Hemingway helped put on the map, happens Jul 7th through July 14th. Maybe I'm making too much of this personal fact, but this means that Hemingway spent many of his birthdays and summer holidays in Spain. In other words, Spain was always Hemingway's vacation, escape from reality, never really his home.

The joy of the spectacle, Hemingway and his fourth wife Mary at a bullfight in Zaragoza.

Timeline of Hemingway in Spain:

1921            At the end of the year, on his way to Paris to be a correspondent, he makes
                    his first stop in Spain, at the port of Vigo, but for only four hours
1923            His first visit to Pamplona for San Fermín; Visits Ronda
1924            Spends July in Spain watching bullfights; its was this particular trip that,
                    according to one biographer (Stanton), inspired the novel The Sun Also Rises;
                    he and his wife (Hadley) also visited the town Burguete in the Pyrenees
1925            Spends July in Spain watching bullfights; he and Hadley visit Madrid,  
                    Valencia, and San Sebastian; following the trip Hemingway starts
                    writing The Sun Also Rises
1926            Spends July in Spain watching bullfights
1927            Spends the summer in Spain with his new wife (Pauline); they visit Galicia
                    and in particular Santiago de Compostela
1929            Spends July in Spain watching bullfights
1930            Spends the summer in Spain watching more bullfights, including Pamplona's,
                    working on his book Death in the Afternoon
1931            From May through August, he passes the summer in Spain curious about the
                    newly proclaimed Second Republic; Arrives in Vigo; watches more bullfights
                    Pamplona's, and continuing to write his book Death in the Afternoon;
                    visits Ávila
1933            In August he travels to Spain with his wife (Pauline) and two sons to see the
                    bullfights in Extremadura
1937-1938   Hemingway was a wartime news correspondent for Collier's, covering the
                    Civil War from March 1937 to May 1938 and stationed out of Madrid. He
                    would also helped with the production of the propaganda film Tierra de 
                    España (1937) and become involved with the International Brigade, fighting
                    on behalf of the Republican forces. Hemingway also met future wife Gellhorn
                    during this period
1953            Invited back to Spain to see Pamplona's San Fermín festivities in July.
1954            Watches the San Isidro bullfights in Madrid in May and June
1956            Visited Spain in September and October: watched more bullfights; visited  
                    El Escorial; and went to a friend's (Pío Baroja) funeral in San Sebastian
1959            Went to Spain in July to documented the Pamplona San Fermín Festival for
                    a Life Magazine series; and stayed with his friend in Cónsola, Málaga
1960            Vacationed in Spain: Pamplona's San Fermín Festival; and again Málaga

NOTE: Here I've only begun to trace out his visits, as I know from many different accounts that Hemingway did manage to make trips to Barcelona, Burgos, Segovia, La Granja, and many other Spanish locales not listed here. Readers and Hemingway enthusiasts, please feel free to help me fill out the gaps and poorly specified trip itineraries.

Hemingway talking with famous matador and friend, Antonio Ordóñez.
Ordóñez would appear in The Dangerous Summer, published posthumously.

In the next entry I'll say a bit about those famous works Hemingway wrote on Spain, and the picture it paints of the country. I'll also point you to online resources about him which I've found useful to peruse. As foreshadowing, I want to do a shout out to The Hemingway Project, which is a great blog examining all things Hemingway and whose blogger strikes a nice balance between enthusiasm and respect for Don Ernesto's legacy, but also open-mindedness about his limitations and critiques of his works.

Postscript: If you're curious what Spaniards think of Hemingway, you might check out this very recent blog entry about Hemingway in El País, and especially the comments posted.

A more somber image of Hemingway in Málaga in 1959. The unavoidable
Catholic iconography that punctuated Hemingway's depictions of Spanish culture.