Butler's Cinema Scene

Giovanni Ribisi, Adrian Sparks

“PAPA HEMINGWAY IN CUBA”  My rating: C+

134 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Papa Hemingway in Cuba” has a terrific back story.

In fact, how the film got made is considerably more interesting than the movie itself.

Director Bob Yari (up to now he’s had mostly producing credits), working from a semi-autobiographical screenplay from the late journalist Denne Bart Petitclerc, filmed his feature in Cuba despite the economic embargo imposed by the United States more than a half-century ago.  “Papa”  is the first American film shot in that island nation since Castro’s communist revolution in 1959.

Moreover, Petitclerc had an intimate relationship with the volatile author and his wife, Mary Hemingway, and his yarn drops a couple of bombshell revelations which feel like dramatic license but which Petitclerc’s widow claims are based on real events.

The picture begins with Petitclerc’s fictional alter ego, Ed Myers (Giovanni Ribisi), writing an unabashed fan letter to Hemingway. The Miami newspaperman is at first skeptical when he gets a telephone call from a man claiming to be Ernest Hemingway. But it’s the real deal, and “Papa” invites the young man to visit him in his Havana retreat.

The invitation leads to repeated visits to Cuba and a deepening relationship between Ed, Papa (Adrian Sparks) and Mary Hemingway (Joely Richardson). Ed is initially cowed by the couple’s bohemian lifestyle (skinny-dipping in the pool, all-night drinking sessions) but slowly fits in  with the Hemingways’ literary/political crowd.

As an insider Ed is privy to both the inspiring and the appalling sides of the Hemingway legend. Papa is a great literary mentor; he’s also an egoist, a  macho-infused drunk, and though only  in his late 50s, sexually impotent.

All this simmering upheaval takes place against a background of even greater unrest. Castro’s revolutionaries are a growing threat to the Batista regime, which responds with ever more repressive policies.

Adrian Sparks, Joely Richardson

The film posits  that Hemingway used his beloved fishing boat to run guns to the revolutionaries. Furthermore, it claims that FBI persecution of the author (which many believe drove him to suicide a few years later) was based on Papa having witnessed FBI director J. Edgar Hoover  in drag at a party. Them’s some big assertions.

Add to this dramatic setup the fact that Yari was able to film in the exact locations where the events took place — including Hemingway’s paradisical home, now a museum — and you’ve got a fascinating stew of a movie.

Except that something’s off key. In part it goes back to Petitclerc’s screenplay, which may be based on fact but dramatically moves in lurching fits and starts. (A subplot with Minka Kelly as Ed’s on-and-off love interest is stillborn.)

The real issue, though, is the casting of Adrian Sparks as Hemingway.  Sparks is a dead ringer for Papa, and in fact played the author in a successful one-man stage show.  But his performance feels more like an imitation than  a probing exploration into a famous and famously troubled personality.

Why does Sparks’ performance not quite work? We’re dealing with intangibles here, but I think the problem is that the camera does’t love him. Maybe it’s his stage background, but he never seizes the screen the way you expect Hemingway should. There’s nothing technically wrong with his performance, but it never feels fully inhabited.

In fact, the most memorable performance in the film belongs to Shaun Toub, who plays Hemingway pal Evan Shipman, a poet and Thoroughbred racing writer slowly dying of wounds suffered two decades earlier fighting for the leftist Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War.  Toub, one of those vaguely ethnic faces faces (he’s Iranian) we’ve seen countless times on film and television, gives “Papa Hemingway…” an emotional core sadly lacking elsewhere.

The film looks great, and Cuba appears so inviting that “Papa Hemingway…” could double as a tourism advertisement.

But dramatically it’s a mixed bag.

| Robert W. Butler