Hemingway

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

A complex person who brought simplicity to writing.

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.

I enjoyed this documentary; as I do most all documentaries done by Mr. Burns and unlike so many other reviewers, I am a fan of Hemingway's writing; a millenial fan at that. And in the spirit of Hemingway, I'll keep this review short and to the point.

The main focus of this six hour affair was Hemingway's relationships; especially with regards to the women in his life. I found this choice interesting, and insightful. The only downside to said choice, is that other parts of his life were glossed over; parts I find exceedingly engrossing; i.e. His literary beefs (Faulkner immediately comes to mind) and the friendships he formed in Paris with his fellow artists. Despite me knowing quite a bit about most of his contemporaries in Paris, a little backstory about each would've been an welcomed addition. These are my only real complaints about the documentary. Here's to hoping an equally good Faulkner or Wolfe documentary is in the works.

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.

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.