A Year Or Two With Ernest-“Papa: Hemingway In Cuba” (2015)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Film Critic Sandy Salmon

[As long-time readers know I have recently taken over the day to day chores of film review for this site from my old friend and competitor from the American Film Gazette days Sam Lowell (that old friend and competitor by the way Sam’s designation not mine). He has on occasion like recently in reviewing a couple of rock and roll tribute-type films which I did not feel were worthy of coverage taken advantage of his privilege to write something here if the “spirit moves him” (his expression “stolen” from the Quakers I believe).    

That was well and good when it came to those rock and roll films where madmen DJs run a pirate radio station off the coast of England when they are thwarted by the appropriate authorities concerned about the corrupting of the morals of the youth who were gravitating toward the seductive lure of rock music or when a slumming grunge band type mad monk put together a rock band composed of fourth-graders but when Sam tried to horn in a review of a movie connected to a serious literary figure like Ernest Hemingway I had to put my foot down. We had both viewed the film together and he had tried to invoke some seniority baloney to grab this one. I had to take the exceptional step and go to the site administrator Pete Markin and have him explain the “what for” to the recalcitrant Mister Lowell. You see whose name is on the byline so you know how Pete decided “what for.” Sandy Salmon]

Papa: Hemingway in Cuba, starring Giovanni Ribisi, Joely Richardson, Adrian Sparks, filmed in Cuba, 2015     

No question young men, maybe women too but Ernest Hemingway by subject matter and by reputation seemed to be the quintessential man’s man writer for good or evil, of the generation before mine and of my own generation who had a taste for the literary life saw him (along with Scott Fitzgerald on his good days, his The Great Gatsby good days) as the paragon of solid sparse writing that drew us in. As a kid anything to do with Hemingway was grabbed up by me and devoured on many a late night lights out read (and re-devoured many times if such a thing can happen with the written word). So when a colleague and I, a man of my generation, saw this film under review together, Papa: Hemingway In Cuba, we almost came to blows about who would review the thing. That emotional response despite the fact that both of us agreed that the film itself seemed kind of maudlin and less than informative as a slice of life semi-biopic.      

Naturally since the film is not an actual biopic about either Hemingway or the young writer, Denn Bart Petticlerc, whose memoir the film is based on the producers used plenty of cinematic license in translating that story to the screen (just as any self-respecting writer would use a great deal of literary license to the same effect). But they got the main thrust of the memoir right-the story of how a young writer (Ed Myers in the film played by Giovanni Ribisi) caught the attention of Ernest Hemingway (played by Adrian Spark who looked the very image of Papa when I looked at some old photographs) and developed a mentor-kind of surrogate son relationship late in Papa’s life a couple of years before he put an end to his saga with a shotgun blast to his head.         

Of course Hemingway seemingly spent half of his life in some kind of exile or out of America anyway and Cuba was his home along with his fourth wife, the well-known foreign correspondent Mary Welsh, played by Joely Richardson, for a good portion of the last twenty or so years of his life. Of course like some kind of fateful muse the period when Papa and Ed were friendly also happened to be a time when the Cuban Revolution, Castro’s guerilla fighters, were coming down from the hills to confront Batista and his forces in the cities. At that point you know that regime’s days were short, extremely short. So between adventure and writing tips they developed a short term bond.  And an odd sort of ménage with Mary (although Ed had a real love interest back at his newspaper in Miami in the days before it became Little Havana).    

As already noted this film suffered from some overwrought emotional scenes of Hemingway in decline, in a love-hate relationship with Mary which seemed cruelty itself on both their parts at time. The real shocker for any writer watching though was Hemingway’s frustration that he could no longer write, had “writer’s block” the dreaded words that every writer, pro or amateur, wakes up in the midnight hour sweating about. Papa had the shakes that way too. Maybe he had lost it at the end but go read The Sun Also Rises, For Whom The Bells Toll, and The Old Man and The Sea if you want to know what it was like when Papa had the words, when he wrote those sparse clean words for keeps.