Ernest Hemingway, the Papa of literature, famous teller of men’s tales, big-game hunter, cross-dresser and sad suicide, is coming back to the big screen in a big way. There’s been a recent UK take on Garden of Eden, Tommy Lee Jones is prepping his version of Islands in the Stream (directing, writing and starring) and now Andy Garcia wants to direct Hemingway & Fuentes, a film about the friendship between the author and fishing boat captain Gregorio Fuentes.
Garcia will also write and possibly play Fuentes, while Anthony Hopkins is “loosely attached”, according to THR, to play Hemingway. I don’t love the casting, but Hopkins can certainly play an irascible and vulnerable old man, so it’ll probably grow on me.
The timeline would be the author’s final decade, when he lived in Cuba and Idaho. Will it end with his suicide? There doesn’t seem to be any way around that. Also interesting is Fuentes, who died in 2002 at the age of 104. I don’t know much about the man, but Hemingway’s most interesting aspects are his vulnerabilities, and a long-standing friendship with the sea captain is likely the best way to put those on screen.
As long as we’re going to get a whole stack of Hemingway films under way, let’s do this one: a Thirty-Two Short Stories About Glenn Gould-style film in the vein of the six-word stories created by the author. His was sad and elegant: “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.” Wired has a compendium of these that you can read in about five minutes, including Alan Moore’s: “Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time”