Hemingway

This was broadcast this week in 2-hour time slots on three consecutive nights on PBS. It is very well done and I can't imagine anyone watching it and NOT learning a lot new about the man. His life certainly was not one of a role model and perhaps his many, many faults, both personal and interpersonal, were a necessary part of developing the writing style that made him indelibly famous.

Perhaps even less well known are Hemingway's four rules for writing well:

USE SHORT SENTENCES.

USE SHORT FIRST PARAGRAPHS.

USE VIGOROUS ENGLISH.

BE POSITIVE, NOT NEGATIVE.

Back in my working days I took a course on effective writing, the essence was the same. I would add "use active voice, not passive voice" when you can.

He died before I was 10, and I've never read any of his books, though I've seen the movie adaptations. Heard all my life of his machismo and the suspected underlying homosexuality.

This documentary filled in a lot of the gaps - how he gained his reputation, abused his wives and children (basically everyone in his orbit), his genius for - and perseverance in - writing; his obvious late-life mental illness.

This is a supherb telling of a biography of Hemingway and done in the inimitable style of Ken Burns. It is well paced and presented in such a way that every minute of the 4 1/2 hours or so of the documentary is relevant, except for the talking heads.

Most of the talking heads had nothing to say that was not their opinions, and very often the opinions of people that did not know the person are essentially worthless. To see how a very good documentary can be made without a single talking head, one only need to watch the Apollo 11 documentary film!

If it wasn't for the talking heads I would have given this a 10. Lastly, why does pbs insist on inserting their promos mid screen every 15 or so minutes? It can only be to disrupt the viewers experience, it can have no other purpose!

This is an excellent bio of an iconic figure in American literature. However, the choice of Jeff Daniels to voice Hemingway as he read excerpts from his novels and short stories left me scratching my head and turning on the mute feature. His reading was monotonous and one-note with absolutely no voice inflection whatsoever. The bio's narrator Peter Coyote would have been much more effective, or Liev Schreiber or Adrien Brody, for example, who all have rich, masculine voices. If you could get past Daniel's bland reading, Hemingway's life history done by Ken Burns was well done, informative, and enlightening.

This is the life of passionate and complex man. Here the documentary is very much one of an outsider looking in, like walking through an old museum and seeing lots of memorabilia in glass cases.

The format seems cookie cutter - a Burns documentary and flat narration where the subject of the day could be anything.

It shows what, but never really understands why.

Obviously there has been much effort in to collecting material. But, we are presented with a dry collage of events.