"Hemingway and Gellhorn", debut HBO film last night
As soon as we finished reading the New York Times review of this film on Monday morning, it was an absolute certainty to be watched. A television review writer with a byline that was not familiar, Mike Hale, had an absolute hissy fit of destruction. It is hardly possible to give a film a worse review.
How interesting. With Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman, even a bad film must have some merit. HBO throws big money at their productions. Despite its obvious merit in the breadth of its coverage of events, the Times is deeply flawed in many ways, and a review in this type of attack mode represents something worth watching.
We watched. The reviewer certainly was not completely deranged. Some of the dialogue was stilted, some clichéd, and Clive Owen as Hemingway gave a completely one dimensional performance. The attempt at sex scenes was excruciatingly painful to watch. What were they thinking.
One could guess that the reviewer did not get beyond those flaws.
In fact, the film was really one that had Martha Gellhorn as the central character. Kidman, as her character, had the central role as narrator and the central role as an individual with a moral purpose. She was stuck with some awkward lines as well, but the storyline was absorbing. The integrating with actual footage from the events covered with the action in the films was a key to bringing the history alive.
To anyone with a decent knowledge of history there was no new ground broken except, in this case, a much greater knowledge and appreciation of the war journalism of Martha Gellhorn, the risks that she took to break an obvious gender barrier, and the risks that she took as a reporter in general. One of the first reporters on the beaches in Normandy while her husband at the time enjoyed his celebrity status in the pubs of London while later writing about it as if he were there, she was the real thing. A little research today confirms more than the film even suggests.
The NYT reviewer does somewhat remotely mention the backdrop of many of the places covered in the film as perhaps something worth noting, but otherwise it is not a balanced review in the least. He obviously found something to hate, something that he was above. We were pleased to have something interesting to watch and comment on while watching. We synched up on the timing of certain historic events. We learned much more than we had previously known about Gellhorn. Even though we were very tired, we didn't need to watch a repeat Law and Order, Closer, or House, and in that sense we really appreciated HBO's somewhat flawed effort and liked the film immensely.
Postscript - since the NYT almost always tries to have some balance to anything it writes, this somehow reminded me of their obituary of Dodi Fayed. That has been buried somewhere as it can no longer be found it seems, as least here even in this digital age - should have clipped it.
How interesting. With Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman, even a bad film must have some merit. HBO throws big money at their productions. Despite its obvious merit in the breadth of its coverage of events, the Times is deeply flawed in many ways, and a review in this type of attack mode represents something worth watching.
We watched. The reviewer certainly was not completely deranged. Some of the dialogue was stilted, some clichéd, and Clive Owen as Hemingway gave a completely one dimensional performance. The attempt at sex scenes was excruciatingly painful to watch. What were they thinking.
One could guess that the reviewer did not get beyond those flaws.
In fact, the film was really one that had Martha Gellhorn as the central character. Kidman, as her character, had the central role as narrator and the central role as an individual with a moral purpose. She was stuck with some awkward lines as well, but the storyline was absorbing. The integrating with actual footage from the events covered with the action in the films was a key to bringing the history alive.
To anyone with a decent knowledge of history there was no new ground broken except, in this case, a much greater knowledge and appreciation of the war journalism of Martha Gellhorn, the risks that she took to break an obvious gender barrier, and the risks that she took as a reporter in general. One of the first reporters on the beaches in Normandy while her husband at the time enjoyed his celebrity status in the pubs of London while later writing about it as if he were there, she was the real thing. A little research today confirms more than the film even suggests.
The NYT reviewer does somewhat remotely mention the backdrop of many of the places covered in the film as perhaps something worth noting, but otherwise it is not a balanced review in the least. He obviously found something to hate, something that he was above. We were pleased to have something interesting to watch and comment on while watching. We synched up on the timing of certain historic events. We learned much more than we had previously known about Gellhorn. Even though we were very tired, we didn't need to watch a repeat Law and Order, Closer, or House, and in that sense we really appreciated HBO's somewhat flawed effort and liked the film immensely.
Postscript - since the NYT almost always tries to have some balance to anything it writes, this somehow reminded me of their obituary of Dodi Fayed. That has been buried somewhere as it can no longer be found it seems, as least here even in this digital age - should have clipped it.
posted by John Borden at 11:25 PM
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