Hemingway’s Worst Novel Is Now a Slightly Better Movie

In Across the River and Into the Trees, Liev Schreiber, a very fine actor whom I’d never thought of as resembling Ernest Hemingway, has been made up to evoke, if not exactly mirror, the legendary American author. With his wide face, white beard, sad eyes, and a chest somehow both barrel-shaped and concave, the actor brings a hint of the wounded, rueful poet to the part of the weary Colonel Richard Cantwell, an American veteran of both World Wars now wandering aimlessly through postwar Venice. Cantwell is a tough old soldier, but he seems more like a guy who’d rather talk about art and literature than war and conquest — or, for that matter, duck hunting, an activity he tells everyone he’s hoping to do a lot of during his Venice sojourn, but which he seems not particularly enthusiastic about.

The creation of this spiritual and visual bond between author and protagonist in the film makes sense. Cantwell was based on a couple of people, but he was also the most autobiographical of Hemingway’s characters, in ways both touching and prophetically ominous: About a decade after the novel’s 1950 publication, Hemingway would commit suicide in the same way Cantwell does at the end of the book, thus giving the character’s enveloping sadness a heartbreaking historical resonance. (Hemingway’s own father had done something similar, and the idea haunts much of his work.)

One doesn’t need to know all this to understand or appreciate Paula Ortiz’s film of Across the River and Into the Trees, which takes Hemingway’s ambling, memory-inflected tale and fashions it into a melancholy love story, focusing largely on Cantwell’s romantic conversations and wanderings through Venice with a young, questioning countess, Renata, played by Matilda De Angelis. But in so doing, Ortiz (and screenwriter Peter Flannery) remove what made the novel, for all its massive flaws, unique. The book is built around Cantwell’s memories, as expressed through his own fleeting flashbacks and his interactions with Renata. In these moments he speaks not just of his own life but of any number of things: authors, art, alcohol, battles, generals, the relative quality of French soldiers, the need to forgive your enemies. And it’s all rendered in language of almost unbearable simplicity — even for Hemingway — perhaps in an effort to evoke the cultural differences between the weary American and the young Italian.

There’s no real way to adapt all that without getting laughed off the screen, so Ortiz and Flannery opt for more naturalistic dialogue. But they also keep the memory-play to a minimum, opting instead for a couple of brief, key flashbacks to a bloody wartime encounter in the forest between Cantwell’s soldiers and the enemy. It all makes perfect sense, craft-wise, but it also results in something pedestrian. The movie plays at times like one of Richard Linklater’s Before films, but without the improvisational verve that gave those works such urgency and heart.

Ortiz’s film does have its charms. The Venice locations are presented with all their nocturnal mystery intact, their shadows and deep colors allowing us to imagine beyond the frame. De Angelis is radiant — veteran Spanish cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe contrasts the smooth, luminous beauty of her features with the grizzled, combat-zone roughness of Schreiber’s — and the actress has captured the ethereal nature of Renata, who serves in the novel as a figure of both emotional reconciliation and death. The filmmakers even give her something to do besides just be a vessel for Cantwell’s reveries: He first meets her when she gives him a ride in her gondola. Schreiber is of course always interesting to watch. He’s one of those actors who has become more compelling with age, even as the big parts seem to be drying up. It’s nice to see him take center stage in a movie again.

This is tough, tough material. The novel of Across the River and Into the Trees got vicious reviews at the time, and although its reputation has been somewhat redeemed over the ensuing decades (partly because several of Hemingway’s many posthumously edited and released works are so, so much worse), it’s never really found an audience comparable to the writer’s beloved classics. It doesn’t have much of a story, and a lot of it reads like self-parody. Hemingway’s characteristic minimalism feels less like poetic concision this time around and more like an inability to find the right words; the meter and personality are there, but gone are the depth and dimension, the seemingly effortless shading that made Hemingway’s other characters pop off the page. The result is that while Cantwell might be the most haunted of the author’s literary avatars, he’s also the most one-dimensional.

So, it’s a problematic work but an intensely readable one; I think it’s the worst thing Hemingway published in his lifetime and yet I’ve somehow managed to read it four times. As S.F. Sanderson, one of the book’s defenders, said at the time: “[It] reads, in many passages, as if Hemingway-the-legend were being interviewed by the press.” Is there any way to translate that to the screen? Is it even worth trying? Across the River and Into the Trees gives it a shot, and it doesn’t succeed, but there’s a nobility in such failure, too. A certain long-deceased Nobel laureate might have had something to say about that.