HG has been accused of gluttony and overindulgence in alcohol. HG’s personality has been described as abrasive and overbearing. HG is boring when overcome by vodka and wine. But, HG has never been accused of prudery. Nevertheless, HG finds soft porn in films annoying and tedious. When the male and female leads decide bed is an appropriate venue, the movie grinds to a halt as the camera focuses on that inevitable duo, tits and asses, while tossing in some thighs and legs for good measure. (HG also finds hard core porn boring. The plot is familiar and the conclusion inevitable.) HG was reminded of this last night while watching the HBO film, “Hemingway and Gellhorn.” The movie, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman, is very flawed but has much interesting archival footage of the Spanish Civil War. But, as per usual, there is an almost interminable pause as the nude actors feign passion. HG has no interest in Clive Owen’s bare ass or Nicole Kidman left breast. Nevertheless, the film maker adds the obligatory soft porn. The movie does disservice to Gellhorn, one of the greatest war correspondents (covering every war from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam) and a fine novelist, novella and short story writer. Regrettably, for much of the movie, the camera focuses on Kidman’s bottom. HG is an old guy and very much a product of his time so that feminism has come late in HG’s life. But, reducing powerful, capable women into a catalog of their anatomical parts, is despicable. (A woman executive once described a meeting as one where “the men talked to my breasts.”) Lovers of literature are not well served by the movie. Clive Owen’s Ernest Hemingway has dialogue that seems lifted from Woody Allen’s funny caricature in “Midnight In Paris.” The John Dos Passos (David Strathairn) character is colorless. The very colorful, magnetic photographer, Robert Capa, is reduced to a cipher. Gellhorn deserves serious attention. She is the only woman war correspondent to be honored with a postage stamp. Her depiction of the Dachau concentration camp is searing and classic. She died a few years ago (age 89). A chain smoking, profane, outspoken woman — it would have been fun to get her reaction to the movie and its fictional account of her affair with and marriage to Hemingway. Am sure the reaction would be speckled with many four letter words.
