Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012)
Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012) – This review is going to be pretty short because I don’t have much in the way of thoughts about this movie. The film is about the often tumultuous relationship between war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (Nicole Kidman) and famed novelist Ernest Hemingway (Clive Owen). They go to Spain during Franco’s takeover of the country are in China when Mao Zedong’s revolution against Chiang Kai-shek. A lot of history, filtered through the lens of two great writers. In all perfect fairness I shouldn’t even be writing a review of this movie as I lost interest at several points and did things like play with my cell phone or even read Time magazine. Hemingway & Gellhorn commits what I believe is the cardinal scene of a “true story” movie: it takes riveting and interesting subject matter and renders it boring. The lead performances are decent enough, though it’s neither actor’s best work (and I prefer the decidedly more comic portrayal of Hemingway by Corey Stoll in Midnight in Paris). Kidman comes off better than Owen. A lot of other actors like Robert Duvall, Tony Shalhoub, Rodrigo Santoro, David Straithairn, and for whatever reason Lars Ulrich of Metallica pop for brief roles where they don’t do a whole lot. I really wish I didn’t waste over two and a half hours of my life watching this, but it did fill me with the desire to read the writing of these two writers. I’m sure they’re more interesting than this was… because, well, they’d pretty much have to be…
Persistence of Vision 