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Hemingway & Gellhorn
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Philip Kaufman is among the strangest cases in
contemporary American cinema. He has made one classic (The Right Stuff,
1983), several films with terrific elements (Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1978], The
Wanderers [1979]), and a bunch of absolute shockers, starting with The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)
and proceeding through Quills (2000)
and Twisted (2004).
The Kaufman Problem (for critics, at least) is easily
and swiftly stated: it’s hard to sort out whether his core as an artist is what
leads most directly to his best work or to his worst work. So he’s a real
nutcracker case for auteurism: it’s near impossible to discern (in the terms
that Peter Wollen set out in the structuralist 1960s) the genuine, recurring
personality or signature of Kaufman from the “noise” created by industry,
genres, producer interference, preordained scripts, changing cultural fads, and
so forth. Or the maybe all that accumulated noise (sometimes very interesting
in itself!) is really what his work amounts to?
Now in his 80s, it is not terribly likely that Kaufman
will get to make another major feature film (at one point in the past 20 years,
he was in the running to direct a Nicholas Ray biopic). At the same time, as I
write these words, he is about to be feted with a complete Cinémathèque
française retrospective, in his presence, in March 2020 [update: this event was
subsequently postponed due to Coronavirus]. Beginning as a semi-experimental, “ferociously
independent director”, runs the central blurb for this event (penned by
Jean-François Rauger), then becoming a dazzling representative of the “New
Hollywood” that surged forth in the 1960s and ‘70s, but also “vanishing” along with
it … A filmmaker with “European” obsessions (we’ll get to those), yet “never
losing sight of the need for fascination which constitutes the very essence of
American cinema”. That’s a mouthful. Are any of these contexts really helpful
in defining Kaufman? Or is it more a matter of positioning and tracking him
with the wayward tides of cultural time?
If Kaufman’s career has already reached its logical
end (and I hope to be proven wrong about that!), it did not conclude with a
tiny-budget, digital film like Alan Rudolph’s wonderful Ray Meets Helen (2017), or a defiantly baroque testament such as
Monte Hellman’s Road to Nowhere (2010)
– to take two artists emerging more or less from the same historical “moment”
in American cinema as Kaufman, but far more easily graspable and recognisable
as auteurs in the sense implied above (and also exhibiting – in terms of
production opportunities – a sadly more evident downhill spiral). No, Kaufman
bows out with Hemingway & Gellhorn,
a reasonably handsome HBO production graced with many intriguing digital
composites (placing its characters into clips from newsreels and other archival
footage) and two big stars: Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman.
Is it recognisably, at least on its surface, a Kaufman
film? It sure is. That is, if we have come to regard Kaufman films as needing
to contain: a. a parade of famous historical figures from the arts and
social-political movements (particularly from the modernist 20th century); b. outsize racial-cultural stereotypes; and c. kinky eroticism. It
was Unbearable Lightness, of course
that baked ‘c’ into his trademark signature; it wasn’t really part of The Right Stuff (although that does have
some terrifically sexy byplay in it). On the ‘a’ count, Hemingway & Gellhorn is an almost non-stop onslaught of faces
looking for names, or vice versa: Ernest dukes it out with a hefty fellow in a
dubbing/projection room, a guy who, as he storms off, is greeted (by David
Strathairn as John Dos Passos, “queered” in this depiction) as “Orson”. We
won’t see him again, so a quick follow-up clarifies the matter: “What’s eating
Welles?”, or somesuch. Yes, you have just watched the legendary punch-up of
Welles and Hemingway during the post-production of Joris Ivens’ The Spanish Earth (1937)! And you will
likewise be prompted to note and/or recognise Ivens himself (Lars Ulrich from
Metallica), Robert Capa (Santiago Cabrera), among others … not forgetting (in a
weird torsion between history and its representations) Robert Duvall, who once
played Stalin (for
Ivan Passer in 1992), as now a Stalinesque-knock-off named “General Petrov”.
Speaking of which, there’s ‘b’ in our list: lusty
Spanish flamenco dancers, Russians drinking vodka and challenging foes to
Roulette duels, a dashingly handsome revolutionary hero (Rodrigo Santoro as
Paco Zarra, a fictionalisation of the likely Soviet-executed José Robles) … Every
stereotype is here, one after the other, shamelessly, and often combined for
extra wallop into a single dramatic or comic face-off (such as that between
Hemingway and Petrov). Even, at the least inspired moments, Hemingway and
Gellhorn themselves descend to the marionette level of “macho writer bear” and
“feisty screwball lady” – although Owen and Kidman certainly throw everything
they’ve got at the task at hand.
Only Raúl Ruiz in Klimt (2006) really knew how to restage these mythic scenes of cultural celebrities
in love and war, with all their associated stereotypes, clichés and performance
modes, and make it work by putting the lot into strategic quotation marks: all
as tableaux from a prewritten book (or a thousand prewritten books). Kaufman,
more on the side of that “need for fascination which constitutes the very
essence of American cinema”, tries to keep things more or less “real” and
casual, but can never risk us missing the significance of anything that’s floating
past. No less than Klimt, in fact, Hemingway & Gellhorn – scripted by
Jerry Stahl (of Permanent Midnight [1998]
fame!) and the immensely gifted Barbara Turner (1936-2016: Georgia [1995], Pollock [2000] and The Company [2003], all remarkable) – is a patchwork of quotations from interviews, oft
told tales and several credited biographies, plus some necessary bridging
extrapolations of the imagination (“dramatic re-enactment” – perhaps especially
in the sex scenes).
The different, trademarked bits of Kaufmanian cinema
don’t always come together coherently here. The film is framed, intriguingly,
by a (probably compositely derived) interview with the elderly Gellhorn (Kidman
in heavy make-up: no Irishman effects
on the faces here!) that begins, and mostly proceeds, as an intimate narration
addressed to us – until, at the last, it’s pulled back into one deliberately awkward
interview that breaks down on the uttering of the famous Wikipedia quote from
the great and proud journalist: “Why should I be
merely a footnote in his life?” Long before that, though – the first words we
hear, in fact – there’s another Wiki passage:
If I practised sex out of moral conviction, that was one thing; but to
enjoy it ... seemed a defeat. I accompanied men and was accompanied in action,
in the extrovert part of life; I plunged into that ... but not sex; that seemed
to be their delight, and all I got was a pleasure of being wanted, I suppose,
and the tenderness (not nearly enough) that a man gives when he is satisfied. I
daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents.
OK: a bit grim, but definitely honest, testamentary
stuff. But how to square the content of that monologue with the scenes of
Gellhorn in erotic congress with the Big Guy? Martha seems to be “plunging”
into sex alright here. These are (ahem) the “European” scenes, and not just
because they’re supposedly happening in European locales: we are back into a
rerun of the sophisticated, continental erotica of Unbearable Lightness, Henry
& June (1990) and Quills.
Meaning: H & G’s first fuck, as war bombs explode in Madrid and ceiling
plaster falls over their tangled, naked bodies, is a “spontaneous” recreation
(or anticipation, or something) of the opening sequence of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959); while an odd
bit of (initially hesitant and dysfunctional) intercourse that takes place in a
dressing room, as our lovers stare (amazed!) at the queer, gender-fluid masks
and clothes coming on and off vulgar-cabaret performers in the adjoining space,
is (I guess) some kind of vaguely Kubrickian, Eyes Wide Shut (1999) type of evoked cinema-orgy-simulacrum.
Speaking of simulacra: sometimes, the real heart-and-soul
of this film seems to be in those fiddly digital composites of fact and fiction
that I’ve already mentioned. These sections and flashes occasionally work quite
well. Kidman’s superimposed face stares out at us gravely from Holocaust
footage; her and Owen dive in and out of war scenes and The Spanish Earth, as well as chatting with US Presidents and their
First Ladies (a fat lot of good – in a fine irony – that does their
predominantly leftist causes). Kaufman almost arrives to a paroxysm of artifice
here, as if his film were a sombre, historical-modernist inversion of an Amy
Heckerling comedy – her melancholic Vamps (2012) is not really so far away, after all, from exactly this: history as a
cartoon slide-show of citations that can, nonetheless, move us deeply.
Hemingway & Gellhorn, for all
its awkwardness as “historical drama”, is never less than interesting to watch,
and is sometimes captivating. Like Zalman King, another, far less celebrated
contemporary, Kaufman was able to parlay a certain 1960s-era, sexual-liberation
sensibility all the way into the feminist 21st century –
successfully giving a glossy editorial spin, datelined “now”, to the retrospective
recreation of 20th century scenes, cultural movements and heroic
personages. It’s more of a successful highwire act, on this split-level of now
and then, than Alan Rudolph managed in, say, The Moderns (1988), Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) or Investigating Sex (2001).
And that’s partly because Gellhorn and Hemingway, in reality, went on to such
vastly different destinies – allowing a split in focus,
and a structural comparison in the way we’re invited to view and assess them.
So if this is indeed Kaufman’s last film (and his last
stand), it’s not too bad – and a heck of a lot better as a testament than Twisted.
MORE Kaufman: Rising Sun © Adrian Martin 27 February 2020 |
