Hemingway & Gellhorn: War and Love
by Loren Coleman ©2012 As soon as the new HBO film, Philip Kaufman's Hemingway & Gellhorn began, I knew I was visually going to enjoy this experience. Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, 1940. To view this television movie, which did not seem like a small screen offering, is to travel back in time, in grays, sepias, and midcentury mosaics. The movie manifests itself as a sensory marvel. Today's media are fixated on talking about the blindingly passionate nude scenes between Ernest Hemingway (played by Clive Owen) and Martha Gellhorn (played by Nicole Kidman). Sure, it happens as bombs go off all around them in her Madrid bed, during the Spanish Civil War. Yes, those are great minutes, to view, to take in for their pure energy, irony, and humor. But there was something else that captured my attention from the beginning, which almost sounds like one of the carefully placed clichés you hear throughout this film. Hemingway & Gellhorn demonstrates a remarka...