Hemingway

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!

A very good and thorough survey of Hemingway's life.

A complex person who brought simplicity to writing.

Despite the 6-hour running time, this documentary skips along the surface of Hemingway's life like a piece of flint.

Great writer? Yes. Great man? No. Hemingway was a narcissist, a liar, a brute, a womanizer, and a blowhard.

Hemingway basically lived off his wives and lost the friendship of everyone he ever knew. And while this documentary skips along with fleeting mentions of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, etc., it totally neglects an important Paris connection: Robert McAlmon.

It was McAlmon who published Hemingway's first book: "Three Stories and Ten Poems" thru his Contact Publishing. It was McAlmon who accompanied and paid for Hemingway's first trip to Spain to watch the bull fights. And it was McAlmon who was among the first people Hemingway turned on after his success with "The Sun Also Rises."

The novel's character Robert Loeb is based on Harold Loeb and also McAlmon. Hemingway turned on McAlmon and called him a gossip after he learned that McAlmon was "telling tales" about his his sexual proclivities and punched him out in a bar screaming. "Now tell that to your goddamned friends!"

McAlmon later got revenge in his memoir "Being Geniuses Together," and their relationship was further examined in "Letters from Oblivion," a novel by Edward Lorusso.

Great writer, yes. But Hemingway was one nasty piece of work!

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.

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.