User reviews

I'm always leery of historical epics and biopics that never get the history right. Composite characters are created, the time line is messed with, people say things that are attributed to others etc. After viewing Hemmingway and Gellhorn and then doing a little background research, Kaufman and Co. at least got the story right especially the events of the Spanish Civil War. These scenes look exactly like the Robert Capa photos taken when he accompanied Hemmingway and Gellhorn. Nicole Kidman is great as usual, Clive Owen is a bit over the top but then again he is playing someone who was in many ways, larger than life. I felt both Robet Duvall and Peter (don't blink or you'll miss him) Coyote talents were wasted in minor roles. The blending of sepia with black and white was a good way to invoke the photos and news footage of the day and by inserting the characters into this historic footage (a la Forrest Gump) really showed that the characters were part of something much larger. At 2 1/2 hours I wasn't bored but it could've benefited from a better script and tightening the story somewhat.

The movie left me flat. I was interested in the history and intrigued to see how it was portrayed. Skipping back and forth between the sepia, black and white and colour formats was disruptive. Further I don't think that the two principals did their roles justice. Like Hemingway they tried, almost painfully at times, to be larger than life and it resulted in inconsistent portrayals of these remarkable characters....both are good actors...probably a function of bad direction. The love affair didn't work at all....I guess a combination of things got in the way of my enjoying the movie. Several times I commented "this is not a very good flick" as we watched...and yet we watched it to the end...knowing how it would end....a strange viewing experience. I wanted it to be better and it had such potential to be so.

Good try at combining a study of complex people and a look at the completely incomprehensible war torn twentieth century experienced first hand by the famous authors. Not an easy assignment.

The suffering of the ravaged and the slaughter of the human race and the love of two volatile writers are given equal time but the subjects are heavy and elusive at best.

The best one can hope for is a film worthy of the fight against Fascism (that could destroy the spirit in the best of us) and hold our interest in these two interesting people.

Still some insight about journalistic war time coverage comes through and there is some good use of cinema tricks and smooth transitions that helps move it all along at an entertaining clip.

Nice Movie, and excellent performance by all the actors, and Nicole Kidman is another story, i was stunned by her performance, i mean she is a really talented actress, and she keep impress me say after day, so i think she deserve an EMMY, specially for the older Galhorn part. its a bit long but not boring so it was a movie to watch. And Clive, he was good. and Rodrigo and all of the other actors. Lars Urich of Metallica surprise me so much. I think Kaufman deserve a life time achievement award for his life work, and i think the film should get more high rates. so i advice everyone to watch it, because it talks about two important American literatures.

Two great actors and a good rea life story, but it just doesn't work. For me it was how artificial and americanized it felt. The Spain they paint is clearly a set, not at all Madrid but a romantic idea of someone who doesn't know it. Everyone speaks in English, then the cliché of the gorgeous flamenco singer, etc. It just didn't feel authentic at all. It's hard to get into the story which has a lot of common places - and Hemingway is such a macho that he makes it really hard to root for their relationship.

Visually, a cinematic masterpiece on the big screen (San Francisco Castro Theater, May 27, 2012). The old, historical footage blended artistically and imaginatively with the new. The music! Moving and memorable. Nicole Kidman is beautiful as ever. (Can I get the name of her plastic surgeon?) The opening immediately catches your attention, with Ms. Gellhorn telling the story, as a woman of a certain age who is looking back.

On the other hand, I was disappointed to learn so little about their life together and their professions, especially hers. The in-your-face sex left nothing to the imagination. I simply got tired of watching Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen faking it.

Philip Kaufman who directed this long and boring mess of a film knows better (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Twisted, etc) and the idea of reflecting on the relationship between Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn which took place during so many important historical events (Spanish Civil War in Franco's Spain, WW II complete with the Allied Invasion of Europe at Normandy Beach, the Russian Invasion of Finland, the turmoil in China as Communism rose in reaction to the Japanese invasion, the strange position of Cuba in all of this). But the screenplay is so mediocre to very bad (screenwriters Jerry Stahl and Barbara Turner) and the level of acting is so superficial that it simply falls flat.

Martha Gellhorn, the Collier's reporter who becomes a war correspondent and marries Ernest Hemingway as she travels up the ladder of fame, is by far the main character here. A very well made-up aged Martha (Nicole Kidman) opens the story as she is being interviewed for a TV program. We immediately are in flashbacks to how this stern woman met Hemingway in a Key West bar, matched him quip for poorly written quip and finally follows him in a very phony setup: Hemingway (Clive Owens in a shoddy performance) is traveling with John Dos Passos (David Strathairn), Spanish patriot Paco Zarra (Rodrigo Santoro) and crew to shoot a film by Joris Ivens (Lars Ulrich) to show the public the atrocities of Franco in the Spanish Revolution - a tiresomely overused gimmick. Everyone drinks a lot and Hemingway finally seduces Gellhorn to his bed in Madrid (he is currently married to the very Catholic Pauline (Molly Parker) who upon discovery his adultery refuses to divorce him). As the situation in Spain falls down, Hemingway and Gellhorn take their need to write - Hemingway to complete FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS and Martha flies off to various war fronts to be a war correspondent. Together they fight their way through experiences in China and other hot spots until ultimately Hemingway remains drunk in Cuba 'fighting off German U boats' and Gellhorn gives up on him.

Nicole Kidman gives the only remarkable performance; Clive Owens could have phoned in his role. Others in the huge cast of miniscule parts are Robert Duval , embarrassingly bad as a Russian General, Joan Chen as Madame Chiang, Tony Shalhoub as the Russian spy Koltsov, an excellent Santiago Cabrera as the famous war photographer Robert Capa, Peter Coyote (don't blink), Diane Baker, Parker Posey, and Connie Nielsen. The film runs 2 ½ hours on HBO and could easily have been edited down to an hour and a half. The only real saving grace (meaning the only reason to watch it0 is the very artistic way the film is a blend between contemporary cinematography and real film footage from the events in the story. That part is Magical. Otherwise, this is a snooze fest.

Grady Harp

All the bad reviews. I enjoyed the whole movie. So it was a little off historically. It was a really good movie. I liked the way it faded to old film. It kept my interest the whole time and the acting was very believable. I saw Hemingway and Gellhorn, not Owen and Kidman. Critics get just a little too much sometimes. Enjoy the movie for what it was - a good movie that kept me totally entertained for 2 1/2 hours.

A truly miserable film that trades in posing, overacting and phony' hyperdramatic lines. It is Insipidly researched: a five-minute read of Wikipedia may seem adequate to the badly underdeveloped, but why would they be the audience for a film like this. It is clunkily written, in dialogue and in its scenarios. The film is unfair to Hemingway, reducing him to a loud bully conspicuously and constantly panicked about his manhood and ignoring the balance of his life and personality. It is unfair to dos Passos, portraying one who saw much combat and who was regularly passed over for literary prizes because of his conviction. making him appear to be a weak and feckless hanger-on. It is also unfair to Gellhorn, who was a truly great war correspondent.

The actor Clive Owen is quite an unfortunate choice to play Hemingway. Owen never sounds appropriate.

The film's author seems to have a grudge against Hemingway, too.

This seems aimed at no one past a high school freshman level. In fact, it seems to be written by three or four of them, and directed by the least tasteful of the group.

Is American movie-making deliberately getting dumber or are such movies just negligent.

I loved this movie. I was enthralled with the love story between Hemmingway & Gelhorn. Knowing little about his life and really nothing about hers I was drawn into the film by their amazing lives. What a trailblazer she was. It's one of the best performances I have seen from Nichole Kidman or Clive Owen. They had great chemistry together. I believed that they were their characters. This movie was sexy, funny, sad and complicated. Just like life. I also got into the historical aspect of the film which I also knew little about before. One of my favorite parts was Robert Duval as the Russian general. He was awesome. This is the best movie that I have seen on HBO in a while.

An HBO TV movie on the romance and marriage between Ernest Hemingway (Clive Owen) and correspondent Martha Gellhorn (Nicole Kidman). It's a tempestuous affair spanning many years through many war-torn countries ending in their divorce.

I can't really comment on its accuracy, and I can see many Hemingway fans hating this interpretation. Gellhorn is portrayed as a long suffering lover/wife of Hemingway's volatile selfishness. It probably fits better as a Lifetime movie. That's not to say that the story isn't true. It's just that it seems to be simplified.

Philip Kaufman does a distracting thing where he adds the actors into stock news footage of that era. The problem is that it's too jarring. The actors look out of place in these footages. The process is not done perfectly and the movie suffers for it. It's questionable even if he had this style down pat. However it is understandable considering the big production that would otherwise be needed for those big settings.

The actors are top rate. They do the work beautifully. Again I can't comment on its accuracy of the portrayals. But at least they gave the characters the chance to be bigger than cardboard cutouts.

I wanted to enjoy this film very much, and was looking forward to seeing it.

Unfortunately it doesn't deliver in any way other than visually. It was shot and edited beautifully, and had a lot of potential. But that's where it ends.

The story is boring and meandering, and never really gives you anything to sink your teeth into. The character development is shockingly superficial, as though we're automatically supposed to care about Hemingway and Gellhorn simply because they're Hemmingway and Gellhorn. Sadly, it just doesn't work like that; the notoriety of he subject matter isn't enough to carry the story without competent writing to back it up.

Ultimately we're left with a disappointingly empty portrayal of one of the most colorful and dynamic individuals in history.

in this case , it is the best thing. because "Hemingway & Gellhorn" is a beautiful sketch. seductive images, few lines of story, using the presence of the lead actors as basic support for audience. the subject is real generous and this is the real motif of disappointment. because it is only a large picture, ignoring details and nuances, about a meet, a love story, in a superficial manner. sure, it is one of option. not the most inspired in this case. because something essential is missing.and this transforms a promising story in just a too simple film. about Hemingway and Gellhorn.

HBO's 'Gellhorn and Hemingway', a bio picture, is 155 minutes in running time. The story of Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway might have deserved better treatment as a straightforward documentary than a film made for television and the widescreen. Nicole Kidman is Gellhorn and the talented but underrated Clive Owen is Hemingway. There is no other way to call them since they are strong personalities and unstoppable in the pursuit of fame and fortune, love and war. No, they aren't the Martha and George of Albee's 'Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf', but they, each in their own way, seem indestructible personalities, immovable objects that in the end proved incompatible. The fires of passion ignite from the moment Gellhorn meets Hemingway in Sloppy Joe's bar in Havana Cuba in the mid-1930s. The crucible of strong and barely controllable emotion flare up in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Gellhorn proves an apt pupil who learns her craft of writing during war from Hemingway, and she is the inspiration for Maria in his homage to the people of Spain and the International Brigades who fought for the Spanish Republic against the fascist Franco and his Nazi and Italian allies. Were this a simple roll in the hay during the bombing of Madrid, Philip Kaufman's film would be simply another banal love story. It is not. He uses vintage newsreel of the fighting, the street life of Madrid during bombings, the exuberant attach to life in the face of overwhelming odds that the legitimate Republic would prevail against the fascists, with antiquated arms, motley crew of volunteers from Europe, Canada and the US, whose governments imposed an embargo on aid to the democratic government of Spain. Only Soviet Russia offered arms and aid, which complicated the glue that seemed to hold Republic Spain together--democratic, anarchist and communist. In a way, it is a quick study of the people who went to Spain: Joris Ivans who made the sharply strong and powerful 'Spanish Earth' that Hemingway narrated; the photographer Robert Capra, the writer John Dos Passos, whom left a sour taste in Hemingway's mouth. (Dos Passos was less enthusiastic about Hemingway's 'To Have and Have Not', a critique that didn't set lightly on the author's ego.) The interplay of personal rivalry, bravado and love making, more than anything that makes the drama of the first act to World War II vivid and realistic and more or less faithful to the era and the narrative. Biden by the war bug that ultimately will break the marriage of Gellhorn and Hemingway, Kidman as 'Marty' rushes off to cover that small war of Finland's resistance to Russian invasion 1939, in a land grab following the signing of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. Gellhorn at the Finnish front tested the couple's union: Hemingway wanted a woman at home to care for his every whim. Gellhorn, as the daughter of a suffragette, was not cut out for that stay at home role. With an assignment to go to China, Gellhorn takes Hemingway along. He seems less enthralled but goes along; his wife is the star even though his reputation precedes him. In brief scenes, Kaufman manages to recreate the squalor and horror of the Japanese war against China; he even manages to convey the brute strength of Chinese coolies during the difficult and tiring journey on the Yangtze, as though it had come out of John Hersey's 'A Single Pebble'. The HBO film had its lighter but macabre moment when the couple meet Chiang Kai Shek and his wife the American-educated Soong Mai Ling, Mme. Chiang. Nonetheless, it was the coverage of the opening of the second front in the Europe theater of war that broke the marriage, Collier's Magazine regularly employed Gellhorn as a war correspondent, but the lure of Hemingway's name made the magazine appoint him as correspondent for the landing of Allied troops in France. Gellhorn felt betrayed and cleverly devised a way to stow away on a troop ship of nurses, and thus became the first correspondent to go ashore with the troops on D Day. Meanwhile Hemingway found his fourth wife Mary and ended up wounded in the hospital after a night of heavy drinking in a car accident. And here ends the saga of Gellhorn and Hemingway as Kaufman ties up loose ends: Hemingway's suicide and 30 years later with David Frost interviewing Gellhorn, who has not lost her spunk and hard edge as she prepares on the cusp of 90 to cover yet another war. The film does show the fear of loss of manlihood and his loss of sexual and mental prowess. The narrative is told from Kidman's point of view, which is more faithful to the record. Owen gives a good portrait of Hemingway's lust for life and vanity and his unstoppable genius at writing until it is hinted he descended into dementia.

Hemingway & Gellhorn

Writers make excellent lovers because they are amazing at climaxes.

However, when they are two writers in the relationship - as in this biography - the plot gets lost.

After a brief but memorable encounter in a Florida watering hole, war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (Nicole Kidman) and celebrated author Ernest Hemingway (Clive Owen) become smitten.

Their paths don't across again until the Spanish Civil War. This time Gellhorn is covering it for Collier's magazine, while Hemingway is narrating a leftist propaganda picture.

During a bombing raid, the two share a hotel room that ultimately ignites their volatile partnership.

But with Gellhorn's star on the rise and Hemingway feeling slighted, he strikes out in a sadistic manner.

A torrid tale of competing companions, Hemingway and Gellhorn are fascinating characters, but their portrayals, and the film's overall aesthetic, can be hammy.

Incidentally, writer couples mainly squabbling about who gets to off themselves first.

Yellow Light

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I don't understand the praise for Kidman in this role. I couldn't get past her overly botoxed expressionless face (she only showed two emotions with facial gestures throughout the entire movie - a deer in headlights and disgust). Owen doesn't look anything like Hemingway and certainly didn't capture his essence - not even slightly. The sex scenes were nauseating and far too explicit in many ways. Everything about the movie came off as phony, fake, contrived. The sepia effect flashing in and out in certain scenes looked odd. The interaction between the two characters looked forced and unnatural. I kept thinking how much I loved that movie "Julia" (1977) and how wonderful Jane Fonda and Jason Robards were as Lillian Hellman and Dashiel Hammett. Kidman and Owen should have watched that movie before making this one - they could've learned a thing or two about two writers in an intimate relationship and how it should be acted.

This is a really amazing film. Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman give terrific performances. The way Nicole inhabits the character of Martha Gellhorn was a thing to behold. She has never been better! Clive Owen is such a terrific actor and I always enjoy his work. Owen's Hemingway is amazing: he has you laughing with him one moment and the next he terrifies you. It's a really haunting performance and I'm sure they will both be nominated for Emmys. It's full of wonderful actors and superb visual effects. I have been reading about the way they were able to "nest" characters into the archival footage and it's breathtaking. The film takes you all over the world and I was surprised to learn that the whole film was shot in the San Francisco Bay area. What a feat! This film is truly a classic. They don't make them like this anymore. Don't miss it.

"I do not see myself as a footnote to someone else's life." During the beginning of WWII Martha Gellhorn (Kidman), a war correspondent meets the legendary writer Ernest Hemingway (Owen). While working together to report what is going on they begin to fall in love. The romance not only inspires him to write For Whom The Bell Tolls, but also exposes his flaws and Gellhorn makes history. I know just about nothing about Hemingway, I know the basics. He was a great writer who wrote many classics and killed himself. After watching this, as far as history goes I don't now much more. I say that to tell you that this is not a typical bio-pic. The movie deals much more with the romance then Hemingway's actual writing. I didn't realize what a jerk he was and I don't know if that's true but he was certainly portrayed as one in this movie. The two main actors did a fantastic job in this but the movie itself was very up and down. The beginning and end was good and interesting but the middle tended to drag and was hard to stay focused on the entire time. If I knew more of the actual history of him it may have been more interesting but it was a little slow in parts to me. Overall, I did enjoy this and it is worth watching but make sure you are in the mood for it. I give it a B.

I was really disappointed in this movie. The build up and anticipation for it was great. I had high expectations. With Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman leading the charge, it was Kaufman's to screw up, and screw it up he did.

The characters were shallow, but they fit right in with the ankle deep script. I thought the historic film gimmick was overplayed and laughable at times. Clive Owen tried his hardest to bring life to Stahl and Turner's straw-man. Hemingway never had any real motive and when it appeared that he might, it was abandoned. Nicole Kidman did a fine job as well, but it had to be long days and frustrating nights with the stiff dialogue. The supporting cast was lifeless, filled with assumptions, and caricatures of an era. Watching this film was like watching an artist that promised to paint you a masterpiece then he pulled out a mop. This was sloppy film-making and it started with the script and ended with the director. A poor showing for such a rich subject.

It doesn't benefit from being an HBO made for television film, but it does have an indulging romantic moments and enthralling storyline. I wasn't expecting a voice as deep as the one Kidman uses for Gellhorn, but her performance works and you are with Martha's motivations and actions every minute. Clive Owen isn't as successful as Kidman, but he has scenes to seize the audience's attention. Hemingway and Gellhorn mixes the typical style, specifically, the cinematography sparks creativity with different film stocks it utilizes. Not a must see, but a worthy watch.

Rating: 7/10

Grade: B