Is there any doubt Ernest Hemingway would have deplored the gross sentimentality displayed in Papa: Hemingway in Cuba? Short of being merely misguided, this sloppily mounted biopic of the gifted writer in 1959 Havana commits the even greater sin of not seeming to care about its subject. The first film shot in Cuba since that same year of 1959 was hampered during production by having to cut corners in its budget to satisfy falling under a trade embargo cutoff. Yet its occasional out-of-focus shots are the least of its worries: its screenplay seems to have wandered onto the set straight from a nonchalant high school writing workshop.
Written by Denne Bart Petitclerc, a confidant and friend of Hemingway (Adrian Sparks) who died in 2006, Petitclerc is changed in the film to a character named Ed Myers (Giovanni Ribisi). Director Bob Yari, a veteran producer with minimal directing experience, presumably chose to have much of Petitclerc’s script rewritten over the long decade since his death. Why else would Myers blurt out in the newsroom, “Give me some background on this Castro fellow” nearly halfway through the film after several trips to Cuba? Would Petitclerc on his own actually have undermined not only the stature of Hemingway but that of himself as well?
The film also regretfully reveals some of the fan boy text of the letter Myers initially writes to Hemingway. The prose isn’t pretty. Neither is the device that has Myers’ fellow journalist girlfriend actually mail to Hemingway one of the letters Myers keeps tossing in the wastebasket. In fact, the entire subplot of Myers and his girlfriend (Minka Kelly) who stays behind while he flys off to adventures with Papa is not only stale formula but also a needless diversion in a film full of them, including interminable nude swimming scenes and shots of typewriters.
Part capable travelogue (Hemingway’s Havana residence, Finca Vigia, now a museum, is prominently displayed), part exaggerated thriller (Hemingway and Myers manage to dump off Hemingway’s boat a load of weapons meant for Castro’s rebels just seconds before federal agents mount the vessel looking for them), and part Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? parody (Hemingway and his fourth wife Mary do a great deal of verbal sparing here–little of it convincing), Papa: Hemingway in Cuba painstakingly begs for our attention. Yet Hemingway here might as well be James Patterson for all the insight on his character the film exudes.
Painted as a gruff and heartless drunk who repeatedly bullies Mary only to subsequently casually apologize, the complexities of the historical figure of Hemingway remain shunned here. Plagued with a hereditary manic depressive nature; many head, spinal and intestinal injuries suffered from a lifetime of accidents and boxing injuries; and chronic untreated alcoholism, Hemingway was nonetheless apparently a much gentler soul than this film depicts. As biographer Paul Hendrickson asserts in “Hemingway’s Boat,” “Underneath there was a bookish man in glasses trying to get his work done, and finding it harder with each passing year.”