Amazing portrayal of Hemingway in 'In Love and War'

By Laksmi Pamuntjak-Djohan

JAKARTA (JP): The New Yorker's Anthony Lane compared cinema to souffle: light and fluffy if you do it quickly, leathery and sunken if you don't.

Well, there is another category: cinema as emotional epic, courtesy of The English Patient.

Sir Richard Attenborough, whose credits include Gandhi and Shadowlands may be well placed to attempt an American equivalent ("The American Patient"?) yet what comes out is a very sunken souffle.

Not only is it dull as ditchwater, it sheds little light on what is supposed to be its subject matter.

One thing is certain. Ernest Hemingway cannot be blamed, even if he is at the heart of it all.

The script we're talking about is, of course, In Love and War, adapted from Hemingway in Love and War: The secret diaries of Agnes von Kurowsky by Henry S. Villard and James Nagel.

Yet the problem lies not so much with validity as a nagging disbelief that, young or otherwise, the man who, according to Saul Bellow, "changed the way Americans talked and the way Americans wrote" could be so ... immature.

That is, of course, if we believe in Agnes von Kurowsky's account, or rather, Chris O'Donnell's and Sandra Bullock's interpretation of it.

As she would have us believe, her relationship with a very young and very earnest Ernest during World War I hadn't only formed the basis of his most famous work, Farewell to Arms, but also transformed him into the embittered, sardonic guy who became, arguably, America's most celebrated writer.

Wounded in Italy in 1918 as a volunteer for the American Field Service, the 18-year-old Hemingway, then a journalist for the Kansas City-based Star, fell in love with von Kurowsky, a Red Cross nurse who lovingly tended to his gangrenous and festering leg. As they embarked on a complicated, tumultuous relationship, the strains of war and their eight year age difference finally took its toll.

This chapter of Hemingway's life is well-documented, although there has never been any mention of von Kurowsky. "I died then," said Hemingway once in recollection of the time when 237 fragments of sawed-off steel rods filled his legs as he was handing chocolate bars to Italian soldiers in their trenches.

Prior to that, boosting the morale of Italian troops in the wake of the Austrian onslaught might have seemed like fun.

The mystique of courage has always been central to Hemingway's literary persona, in his life or fiction. Taking risks was second nature, whether through boxing, betting horses, befriending escaped convicts and gangsters, even playing with bulls at close range. As Alfred G. Aronowitz and Peter Hamill wrote in a 1961 biography, "He flirts with the danger of them all."

But if we accept a hidden part in Hemingway's life that only intimate accounts can provide, it would be nice to see some semblance of him left over.

A certain youthful cockiness may be in order, yet what Chris O'Donnell does is beyond belief. If one talks egregious miscasting, as Movie Line did recently, Sandra Bullock can heave a sigh of relief for coming second, not first.

O'Donnell does his best to convince us that he is, in fact, a character, but he's out of his depth. Smirking and grinning like there's no tomorrow, he brings not an ounce of depth or gravity to the role.

Portraying Earnest Hemingway as an naive, gung-ho idealist,is one thing but presenting him as whipped-cream-and- chocolate fop and hoping we'll fall for it is another.

The brutalities of war and the imperfections of humanity don't seem to interest O'Donnell very much. No trace of love glimmers in his eyes as he pursues his Great Love despite competition from doctor Caracciolo (Emilio Bonucci) and his own mate, Henry Villard who co-wrote the novel. Here O'Donnell is just a pin-up guy trying to kill time before donning the Robin suit.

Portraying the disillusioned Hemingway as a raging bull during the movie's finale doesn't help either. What could have been poignant becomes farcical, as the strong whiff of futility in earlier scenes becomes a fully airborne virus.

What was intended as antidote to blockbusteritis makes us yearn for Batman and Robin.

Worse, O'Donnell and pesky Sandra Bullock make one of the great no-sparks couples in recent cinema. Despite a price tag of over US$10 million maturity is not her strong point. Although credible enough as an object of male affections, Bullock is an actress of limited range who is entirely ill-suited to play a woman who inspired great literature.

Much as we want to believe her flat pledge; "I love you. I will always love you" to an equally colorless O'Donnell, we just can't.

But, to be fair, the blandness of the whole enterprise gives the actors very little to work with- no emotions, no obsessions, no introspection, no drama. The script by Allan Scott, Clancy Sigal and Anna Hamilton Phelan is shallow and banal, plonking scenes onto their designated places like trench mortars, never bothering to provide additional background, let alone history.

Roger Pratt's cinematography is warm and pleasing, but never breathtaking. The music by George Fenton is gorgeous on its own, but mostly vanishes in the face of vapid mis-en-scene. The dialogue is passable, but never witty or engaging.

If Attenborough is trying to put a new stamp on the genre, trading Anthony Minghella's rich nuances for flat editing, exquisite subtleties for limp insinuations, artistry for mundanity, inspiration for monotony, character actors with box- office actors, then thank God for Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley in Farewell to Arms.