“Hemingway” Review by Josh Davis : Pop Culture Leftovers

“Hemingway” Review by Josh Davis

April 11, 2021 8:41 am |

“Hemingway,” an exhaustive and captivating new documentary from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, is a dream come true for fans of Ernest Hemingway, who was perhaps the most influential writer of the 20th century.

The three part, six-hour series covers Hemingway from his birth and early life in the suburbs of Chicago, to his tragic suicide in 1961, at the age of 61.
Burns and Novick tell the story through a series of interviews with people who knew the author, along with many of the writers he influenced. There are also dramatic recreations woven together through photographs and old film clips, as well as many passages from Hemingway short stories, novels and nonfiction works, read by actor Jeff Daniels.

Those parts are particularly fascinating and showcase Hemingway’s growth and power as an author, starting with the early short stories and leading up to his final works.

One passage from “Indian Camp,” among his first published stories, is used a reoccurring theme and becomes utterly heartbreaking when referenced in the final episode.

Meryl Streep, Keri Russell, Patricia Clarkson and Mary-Louise Parker also serve as the voice cast for Hemingway’s four wives, retelling their stories through letters and other written recollections.

In recent interviews, Burns shared that one of the things he learned during filming was that Hemingway, an infamous symbol of machismo, had a long and documented streak of androgyny. That began when his eccentric mother, Grace, raised Hemingway and his older sister Marcelline as if they were twins, often dressing them both in matching outfits — as both boys and as girls.

Hemingway continued to play with that fluidity throughout his adulthood, and even late in life with his fourth wife, Mary, as the couple would swap gender roles in bed. It’s the kind of intimate detail that casts a new light on the author, often depicted as a hyper-masculine figure associated with hunting, fishing and bullfighting.

The series also paints Hemingway as being extremely insecure and frustrated with his writing. Despite his early success — his first two novels “The Sun Also Rises” and “A Farewell to Arms” were landmarks and made him one of the most famous figures in the world — Hemingway often found himself trying to live up to his own, enormous persona.

Hemingway couldn’t enlist in the U.S. Army during World War I because of poor eyesight, so he instead volunteered with the Red Cross. While serving near the Italian front, he was severely wounded by mortar fire and spent a week in a field hospital, which became the basis for “A Farewell to Arms.”
The black and white images shown during this sequence are not for the feint of heart, and Burns and Novick don’t hide from the brutality of war and the affect that had on the young writer.

Despite the injuries and trauma, Hemingway often went back into war on his own accord. He later served as a foreign correspondent during the Spanish Civil War, and again during World War II. He was even present during the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944, and would occasionally pick up a gun or a handful of grenades to lend a hand while following the Allies near the end of the war, much to the chagrin of his fellow correspondents.

When Hemingway wasn’t surrounded by armed conflicts, he was often traveling for other reasons. The series spends ample time retracing his steps through Spanish cities from Madrid to Pamplona, watching the bullfights that would influence much of his fiction and nonfiction writing.
Again, the filmmakers aren’t shy about the brutality of it all, as the images onscreen show everything from stacks of bodies during wartime, to scores of bulls stuck with banderillas and slowly bleeding out in front of massive crowds in Spanish stadiums.

We also get to see the picturesque plains of Africa, which Hemingway loved to use as a hunting ground for big game, and the shores of Key West and Cuba where Hemingway made his home and became enamored with the fishing culture that would help inform his last masterpiece, “The Old Man and the Sea.”

While Hemingway tried to fill his life with those thrills, he also suffered from terrible depression and alcoholism that haunted him throughout his life.

After the massive acclaim of his first two novels, Hemingway struggled to repeat that success, and to win over critics and audiences with much of his middle and later works.

He had a tortured family life, was often verbally and even physically abusive to each of his wives, and two of his three sons suffered from mental illness. In one interview, his middle son, Patrick, calls Hemingway a great father, but in another he talks about terrible fights and not speaking to each other for several years.

In another poignant interview, Sen. John McCain, who passed away two years ago, talks about discovering “For Whom the Bell Tolls” at age 12 and finding a personal hero in protagonist Robert Jordan, a college professor who enlists in the Spanish Civil War to help fight fascism.

Later in life, Hemingway suffered from a string of injuries — including several concussions — that compounded with his heavy drinking to devastate his mental capacity. Especially heartbreaking is a brief video from 1954, when a 55-year-old Hemingway struggles to speak on camera while accepting the Nobel Prize in literature. The video was shot not long after he was victim to two plane crashes within days of each other in Africa, when he suffered even further brain trauma.

By the end, Hemingway was in and out of the mental ward at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Even then, because of his unparalleled fame, he spent time drinking his the doctors and others in his room at the clinic, and telling increasingly wild and fictional stories about his life.

He died in 1961, at age 61, because of a self-inflicted suicide, following in the footsteps of his father, and at least five other members of the Hemingway family.

“Hemingway,” the series, is a masterful and loving work that, through incredible detail, covers the breadth of one of the greatest American authors. He was a revolutionary because his lean, journalistic style, but led a difficult life that started in early childhood and followed him to his early death.

As an audience, we are shown the violence and alcoholism that contributed to the darker parts of Hemingway’s life. But we’re also treated to insights on what made him such a singular writer, and even some of the tender moments with his children and with each of his four wives.

Ernest Hemingway led a terribly imperfect life. But for fans, “Hemingway,” the series, is about as perfect as a documentary could be.

PCL Rating: Tupperware

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: FRESH