Love is a battlefield in HBO biopic about fiery writers

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Movie stars Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen come to the small screen as Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway.

There's an old saying that suggests all's fair in love and war.

For Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, "fair" -- whether defined as merely average or acceptably just -- had nothing to do with either.

Hemingway, the most celebrated American author of the 20th century, and Gellhorn, a pioneering female war correspondent, shared both love and war, in a manner that was never anything like fair and would much more appropriately have been described in terms of extremes, superlatives, excesses and expletives.

The story of their tempestuous relationship is explored in the new HBO drama Hemingway & Gellhorn (Monday night on HBO Canada, check listings for times), which lures Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman from the big screen to the TV-movie world to play what will surely rank as two of the most compelling characters of their respective careers.

The film opens with an aged Gellhorn (Kidman, under layers of rather convincing makeup) being interviewed by a TV crew. In extreme closeup, between ambitious pulls on an ever-present cigarette, she reflects on her life as a journalist, a lover and a woman.

"I've always felt the most at home in the most difficult places," she tells the camera. "But love? ... I'm a war correspondent."

The film then flashes back to Gellhorn's first chance encounter with Hemingway, in a Key West dive called Sloppy Joe's, where she's fascinated by the burly, sweaty stranger who's holding court with the locals. It isn't quite love at first sight, but the encounter generates enough heat to kindle the beginnings of a shared infatuation.

She's impressed by his manly swagger and literate conversation; he's intrigued by her smarts, gumption and political views. By the time they find themselves in Spain together, covering (and supporting) the anti-Franco resistance (he as part of a documentary film crew, she as a correspondent for Collier's Weekly), their paths have merged.

"I think Martha found her voice when she was with Hemingway," Kidman said last January during HBO's portion of the U.S. networks' semi-annual press tour in Los Angeles. "He was a big part in helping her to, as a line in the film says, 'get in the ring and start throwing some punches for what you believe in.'

"The great thing about Gellhorn was that she was really the first female war correspondent; she wrote about people's lives, and she wrote with such direct truth. And you see, during their relationship, her sort of formulating who she is as a writer -- she's not Hemingway; she doesn't want to write novels. She wants to be a correspondent."

In fact, Gellhorn's journalistic career spanned 60 years, but as the title suggests, Hemingway & Gellhorn focuses solely on the decade (1936 to '45) in which her life was entangled with the great author's.

It's an intoxicating -- and, for the most part, intoxicated -- love story, one that starts with awe-inspiring fireworks and passion and ends with a different kind of pity-prompting pyrotechnics and fury. Gellhorn's ambition and single-mindedness could not, in the end, be restrained by Hemingway's ego, temper and jealousy.

"He thought he wanted a woman who was an adventurer, and then when he finally got her and she wouldn't settle down, and wouldn't be domesticated, he didn't know what to do with her," observes Kidman.

Owen and Kidman are impressive in the title roles, trading emotional haymakers in every round of the short but brutally emphatic Hemingway-Gellhorn courtship, affair, marriage and dissolution. The supporting cast -- including the stellar likes of David Strathairn, Molly Parker, Tony Shaloub, Parker Posey and Peter Coyote -- is solid, but this is, for all intents and purposes, a two-character study.

Kidman, as the older Gellhorn, sums things up best in another of those extreme-closeup moments near the film's end:

"We were good in war. And when there was no war, we made our own. The battlefield neither of us could survive was domestic life."

As it turns out, a pretty fair assessment.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 24, 2012 E5