Review of Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012) by Chris Z — 10 Aug 2015

Have no idea how this movie got anything above a 20 score from either aisle. It's pure crap, and I've become convinced that "Hemingway & Gellhorn" was the take-no-prisoners revenge of a severely pissed off & bitter Sherwood Anderson.

#1: Casting of Clive Owen is DESTRUCTIVELY bad. Between the boorish Clive Owen being completely mis-cast, the words he's got to draw from and the actions he takes induce more snickers and spit-takingly horrible fits of laughter than ANY form of drama. At one point he KICKS in a door during an air raid (while in Spain with a kittenish & absurdly naive Gellhorn), grabs Gellhorn in his arms, then wisks her off to another room to bang her brains out WHILE THE BOMBS DROP OUTSIDE THE FRIGGIN' WINDOW.

Yea. That bad, and in more places than one. I feel bad for the actors. In a movie that otherwise could be called one of the best-cast in any TV film in recent years it seemed the producer/directors wanted to waste as much acting talent as they could pull aboard.

#2 The movie could not decide what it was, what it should look like, or how it should feel throughout its entirety. I understand the attempt may have been a noble one in switching from black & white footage to sepia, to color, etc. as a "romantic character" itself in the film- but this was an example of straight confusion.

On some occaions the elements of the film were grafted into archived footage, some cases not, some cases just the archive footage was shown, some cases chrystal-clear colors.

...While Clive Owen kicked in doors and made love to Gellhorn as the grenades exploded dangerously close to their various extremities.

Maybe the worst scene in the entire film was when (gulp) Hemingway's character decided it wise to play Russian Roulet with a Russian general in order to (lmao) DRUNKENLY protect the weak little sparrow that was Gellhorn from said General from having to dance.

The whole scene is so ludicrously bad one (again) finds it tough not to just bust out laughing at a scene who's intent was not in the least to invoke such a response.

The movie carries on like this for its entirety. Every minute I broke from looking away at the horror that it was, I would eventually look back out of shear morbid curiosity to see what they'd done to Hemingway's memory, and BOOM another bomb goes off with Hemingway swooping in to save Gellhorn from the horror that is war by banging away on her, framed on the screen as tactfully as the cover of a ten-cent bodice-ripper paperback.

All of that acting talent, wasted on a script that was egregiously bad, filmed entirely during amateur hour.