desire & creativity
I saw this film in December of 2010, and I wondered why it wasn't on anyone's Best of 2010 list because I really thought it was the best thing that I saw all year (and I see a lot of movies). Now I see that the reason no one mentioned it was because it was released in 2008 (although I never heard it mentioned until this years 2010 NYTimes Fall/Winter Preview edition mentioned it as if it were a new release).
Suffice it to say that this adaptation is perhaps more whimsical in tone than is Hemingway's posthumously published work Garden of Eden (every moment Richard Grant is on screen is going to have a measure of whimsy) but even with a dose or two of comic relief, this is pretty heady & pretty steamy stuff.
Jack K. Huston (unknown to me before seeing this film) plays a twenty-something Hemingway-ish writer living a splendidly bohemian low rent ex-pat existence in Paris until he meets a wealthy American (Mena Suvari) on a kind of art buying holiday. Once these two...
High on Visuals, Low on Intrique..
The Hemingway novel, Garden of Eden, was not published until after his death. It was an unfinished exploration into gender issues. The movie fails to capture this spirit of exploration and relies mostly on three beautiful bodies and faces to carry us past the contrivances of one character, Catherine. She seems to express her mean spirited alcoholism much better than her sexuality. As in the book, Catherine becomes the wife of David, a thinly disguised stand in for Hemingway. Their courtship is much too short, and their marriage equally so due to Catherine's insistence that they both sleep with a woman she meets called Marita.
If Catherine had been allowed to have a passionate side this movie might have worked. Instead she comes across as a cold, controlling manipulator who treats people like puppets she has purchased. Rather than being passionate about her sexuality, she spends the film acting out various skits with her puppets while drinking too much. After a few of these...
No remorse
This is one of my favorite books and I was anxious to see the movie version. It had good looking people and it was sort of about the book. But the book was about the nature of androgyny, role playing and a woman wanting to be a man because she felt powerless as a woman. The movie was about a threesome. Marita was a real disappointment and David was a bland cipher in no way a representation of Hemingway. Devil wasn't devilish. She had the look, her haircuts were great and she did an OK job, but she just didn't have the sexual spark needed to carry the story. I have no regrets about buying the movie, I wanted to see it and enjoyed it. But it could have been so much better.
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