HEMINGWAY (2021) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Ken Burns, Lynn Novick
The wonderful, terrible life of Ernest Hemingway, chronicled in six hours by American history's resident documentarian, Ken Burns. As a writer, Hemingway's spare, declarative style revolutionized American prose. As a human being, he was mean, bombastic, contradictory, insecure, egotistical, and as he grew older and the cumulative impact of alcohol and head injuries caught up with him, increasingly paranoid and unstable. Behind the outsized bravado was a man obsessed with death and suicide and afraid of sleeping alone, a public manifestation of unalloyed machismo whose private sense of gender lines was fluid. It's all there in the film. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that we are what we pretend to be, so we'd better be goddamn careful what we pretend to be. Some famous people (Cary Grant, for example) carry off the deception by becoming the personas they invent for themselves. Others take on roles that can't be sustained, and when they can't stop playing those parts, are doomed by them. Case in point: Ernest Hemingway.
