Hemingway and Smellhorn: How Tony Soprano Ruined A Story About the Last Real Man

I once had a friend tell me he didn't like Hemingway because Hemingway was misogynistic. I explained Hem was far from misogynist, that if you read his novels you'll see they're peopled by women just as tough as the men and in some cases tougher: the ex-pat a man loves but can't be with because he lost his dick in the war and she loves sex so he just stays all bound up (THE SUN ALSO RISES); the girl who fought her troubled childhood and now fights Franco's fascists (FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS); the tough old ruddy wife who authoritatively runs around town trying to find out about the shootout in her husband's charter boat (TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT). And so on and so forth. The women Hemingway created were flawed but transcendent, like goddesses of old, full of scars but flawless, strong, immortal. And as such in real life Papa was often let down by women - and for that matter men but you expect less out of the men you love than the women.

His sentences, every one is like a shotgun blast to the chest. No delicate little target shooting or rat-a-tat machine gun blasts. They take one shot and destroy everything in their path. As such there are plenty of haters, usually women who don't understand what he was trying to say about his generation and its gender roles. though there are also detractors in the form of men afraid of confrontation, who see manhood as fully detached from any semblance of toughness or self-reliance; the ones who can't handle a shotgun blast to the chest but prefer delicate little .22-caliber pellets in elaborate fanciful tessellations. And I can understand that; just like most modern literature reads to me like some whiny little pussy whose parents needed to make him do more yard work and maybe smack him on the ass a few times growing up, there are men who dislike Hemingway because, perhaps in spite of their protests otherwise, he really does make them feel emasculated. Yes, I can accept this. I just didn't think that James Gandolfini was one of those men.

Just like the movie goes from vintage footage (some of which they insert Hem and/or Gellhorn into, like one scene where he runs off with a rifle into battle and it looks like one of those horrible old movies where somebody's blatantly running in front of a screen) to black and white to sepia to vivid color off and on seemingly without reason, so too are the characters and the writing a pointless mess.

From a technical perspective it's a mess. Nicole Kidman's brogue sneaks in a few times and her character comes across as so smug and self-satisfied one has to wonder why she was ever enamored with Hemingway at all. Clive Owen speaks throughout as if he were John Wayne, not Ernest Hemingway. There's no feeling of character development, but rather this story it jumps around so much and never once gets into anything below the surface.

Let's talk about the characters. In this movie they make Hemingway look like a doddering old fool (that intro scene, fishing on the Pilar, almost looks like a cartoon) while Gellhorn looks like some great legend - blue blood upbringing and daintiness be damned, she WILL travel the world telling stories about local children in war. And instead of talking about the real thing going on here - the old adage that no relationship can handle two writers - they tried to paint Papa Ernest Hemingway as some alcoholic manchild with no real importance to the world, even just barely touching on the writing and publication of his masterpiece FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS while paying way too much time on stale dialogue and stiff love. It's like they figured they could just throw two famous (debatable for Gellhorn) people together against the backdrop of the American 40's and BOOM, there's a movie.

As it ends and you see it's going to paint Gellhorn as the long-suffering brilliant one while he's more of a drunk blowhard (I find it interesting they include a scene where she goes drink for drink with him yet otherwise never do you really see her drinking hard - as if just by sheer will she handles all that booze). But then she runs out and he meets Elizabeth Banks (who just dropped a few rungs in my book thanks to having anythign to do with this) with a line like "I need a woman who can take care of a man" to which she responds "I can be that woman". And there's the real message - they figured all the scenes where he wanted his wife at home, where he wanted to keep her safe but also where he was competitive with her and as such got in her way towards the end, as well as showing him drunk and swaggering like John Wayne, they figured all these scenes didn't outright get their point across - that he expects a woman to be at home taking care of him. As such, the best thing is to share some canned expository dialogue that even Banks and Owen don't seem to be able to make feel even slightly real. Hemingway, a master of dialogue himself, would've been appalled at this miserable writing.

Never is it mentioned that Mary Welsh, who Banks is playing, is a writer for Vogue and that Hem likes her because she's not as much as a shrill bitch as Gellhorn. Gellhorn finds her and Hem in bed after a drunk driving accident (never seen that in any other autobiographies) and he chases her, saying people will be reading him long after she's eaten by worms. To that outburst I can only say It's not grandstanding if it's true.

Then they jump forward like 20 years to make sure to show Hemingway catatonic as Welsh spoons his gruel, a truly broken man, finally, bring great papa down to a level where we can see him, where we can jeer and say "look at us, look how mobile and not-crazy we are." They don't mention the FBI hounding him for years accusing him of communism because of his time in Cuba. They don't show him on safari in Africa or surviving a plane crash, nor do they give Mary Welsh any credit for her journalistic achievements (she was in Paris prior to WWII and London during where she reported on Churchill and bedded Hem). They just jump forward to Hemingway broken down and tired as if to say "he was lost and killed himself because he lost Martha Gellhorn".

There's so much to dig into here. He was in love with a  nurse when he fought in Italy and she left him for another man - some say he never got over that. Then Pauline, the woman leaves for Gellhorn, she stole him from his first wife Hadley with her money and joie de vivre and yet is the one who seems most jilted.

All in all, this can be summed up in one word: rot.

The performances were rotten. I read an earlier draft that was a bit more factual, all around better but it seems like somebody got ahold of it who decided instead of being about a clash of titans it would be about taking down this damned literary hero Hemingway, make him look like a fool, a clown, a petty bastard undeserving of his great reputation. An aside is that Gellhorn was a horrible rager in her own right, with a disgust for intimacy and a borderline MOMMIE DEAREST thing going on at home and yet in this she comes upon as the poor, oppressed angel with gumption and spirit and smarts Hemingway only too obviously was jealous of.

Rotten as well is Gellhorn's holier-than-thou voice, no doubt established by the brilliant writers Jerry Stahl (uhh, last movie he wrote was BAD BOYS II but he did have 3 years writing on ALF, surely a man to encapsulate Hemingway) and Barbara Turner (a washed up actress whose written mostly unheard-of indies, though I did enjoy her movie about POLLOCK, though it also seemed to be about tearing down the artist) who probably fucked Hem once back when she was an actress and still has a bone to pick about him not calling back. The funniest part of this whole fucking embarrassment is the end, in which she says she's not just some footnote to somebody else. Because she is. Because in 100 years nobody will know who the fuck she was except as Hemingway's 3rd wife. Not even a first or last but just one of the middle ones.

When history looks back on great female journalists of the 20th century they'll conjure Christiane Amanpour,  Janine Zacharia, Katie Couric, Barbara Walters, Nancy Hicks Maynard.On the other side, rarely do people remember ANY journalists, male or female. Journalistic style is often found stale by the next generation and as such often the ones seen as the best of their time - who report objectively based on the zeitgeist of their current time - are little more than iterators of facts. As we see from Wikipedia, while the facts will live on, the ones telling them unfortunately do not. Can any of you name any journalists from the 19th century who never wrote novels? Perhaps Woodward and Bernstein will survive the 20th century because they essentially broke the Watergate scandal - and Hunter S. Thompson will as well because he blended journalism with fiction to create works in some preternatural limbo between novel and essay - but for the most part, unfortunately, journalists are rarely immortal. Especially ones who simply relay events instead of actually shaping them.

I expected more out of Philip Kaufman, the director of THE RIGHT STUFF and THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING and even the similarly-titled HENRY AND JUNE (about writer Henry Miller and his 2nd wife, June). I expected it to be epic, to have passions flaring and yet it all felt canned, contrived, made to serve a purpose it couldn't tell honestly. With Hemingway's vow that one should simply write truly and it will feel true, it's very obvious that such was not the case here. The original script was more of a story about their joint struggles, not about how Gellhorn was a much better person than Hemingway. They took away such great lines as, when Gellhorn meets up with Hemingway in Paris he's at the Ritz, inviting her to toast to the fact that "We've liberated the Ritz!". And again, the changing from B&W to real footage to sepia to full color did nothing but irritate me, just another uninspired move no doubt done with the idea of making it poignant and unique since it was obvious the story and performances wouldn't do that.

Huffington Post's glowing article about it is as predicted: a female reporter happy to see Hemingway put in his place, misquoting brilliant Hem lines like "There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at your typewriter and bleed" as "...All you do is sit down at your typewriter and type." Maybe that's why Arianna Huffington was demoted from her new job to go back and supervise her staler-by-the-minute blog. Because they misquote fucking TV movies, a true sign of amateur hour.

This is, then, James Gandolfini's fault because he's the producer. And as a supposed "guy's guy" and, even more, as a man whose whole career was built on truthfully portraying a powerful and yet ambiguous and confused gangster, I would've expected more. With such 3-dimensional characters, including one who was one of the last bastions of real masculinity in an incredibly de-sexed America, to have portrayed them as 2-dimensional cliches is just a fucking crime.

There is still hope, though. HEMINGWAY AND FUENTES has just begun pre-production. A much more profound story about Hemingway's later years, from his love affair with cuba and fishing to his friendship with his boat captain Fuentes, the inspiration for Hem's Pulitzer and Nobel-winner OLD MAN AND THE SEA. With Andy Garcia as Fuentes, Anthony Hopkins as Hemingway, and Annette Benning as Mary Welsh look for something amazing to emerge. Certainly having a cast, director, and writer who are still working regularly in the business already pushes this ahead of the crew of has-beens who through HEM & GELL together like a bunch of monkeys combining shit on the wall. It just needs to come soon. Because this rotten HBO TV movie is so bad it literally made me violently ill. Like a hangover from bad, cheap booze but without the semblance of a good story to tell in the morning.

To James Gandolfini, Jerry Stahl, Barbara Turner, Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman I have one thing to say - fuck you. The world will remember Ernest Hemingway LONG after they've forgotten about you or this piece of trash you pulled together.

- Ryan