With Corey Stoll winning all kinds of attention thanks to his comedically deadpan take on Ernest Hemingway in Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris," Clive Owen will suddenly find his performance as the great author under much more scrutiny in the upcoming HBO film, "Hemingway & Gellhorn."
Co-starring Nicole Kidman and directed by Phillip Kaufman (”The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” “Quills”), the film will tell the story of the titular Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn who shared a tumultuous relationship and five-year marriage which began after meeting at a local Key West bar in 1936. They married in 1940 after romancing in Europe with Hemingway’s famous novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” written during that time. Their respective correspondent work, however, meant they spent a significant time apart, which was ultimately a driving factor behind their divorce in 1945. Both tragically ended their own lives — Hemingway in 1961, struggling with psychological and physical deterioration and Gellhorn years later in 1998 after a long battle with cancer and blindness. Fun!
If there is anything we're uncertain of at this point, it's the tone of the film, which in this extended five-minute trailer wheels wildly from the comic, to the dramatic, to the camp (the sex scene, amongst explosions, is fairly over-the-top). And while we were uncertain of Owen as Hemingway, as the spot goes on, his performance comes into its own. As for Kidman, as usual, she looks like she's delivering a firecracker of a performance.
David Strathairn, Parker Posey, Rodrigo Santoro, Molly Parker, Peter Coyote, Tony Shalhoub and Lars Ulrich round out the cast. No exact air date yet, but the film is slated to premiere on HBO in May. Watch below. [via Vlicious]
