Film Review for Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden
The life and work of Ernest Hemingway have been notoriously difficult to translate comfortably onto the screen. For one thing, his signature spare sentences, when spoken by actors, often sound as affected as the most rococo effusions of Oscar Wilde. Beyond that, Hemingway’s chest-beating, rifle-bearing Papa Bear explorer persona seems overbearingly pompous if not creepily antediluvian in these postfeminist times.
For all the cinematic crimes against him, there has been no book-to-screen translation of his work quite as atrocious as “Hemingway’s Garden of Eden,” directed by John Irvin from a screenplay by James Scott Linville. An adaptation of Hemingway’s problematic erotic novel, “The Garden of Eden,” posthumously published in 1986, it stars Mena Suvari as the meanest mean girl (pun intended) to spit venom in any film since I don’t know when.
Her character, Catherine, a rich, bored heiress, is so unrelentingly cruel to her husband, David Bourne (Jack Huston), a shy young writer enjoying his first flush of success, that the now-frowned-upon adjective “castrating” is the most appropriate printable word to describe her.
The story, set in 1927 in the South of France and Spain, follows the rapidly disintegrating marriage of David and Catherine, who met in Paris. No sooner have they wed than she persuades him to experiment with sexual role reversal. During sex (and there’s a lot of it), she insists on being the aggressive top partner.
Catherine cuts her hair to look more like a boy, and before long, both their heads are bleached identical shades of platinum. She lures Marita (Caterina Murino), an Italian beauty, to live with them as a ménage à trois in their beachside house in La Napoule, not far from Cannes. After sleeping with Marita, Catherine pressures David to do the same. Catherine is so wildly jealous of her husband’s writing that she impulsively incinerates his hot-off-the-typewriter short story, along with the clippings of his good reviews.
In that short story David recalls a boyhood excursion to Africa with his father (Matthew Modine), during which he witnessed the killing of an elephant. As the movie crisscrosses awkwardly between David’s memories of the trip and his honeymoon in hell, it metaphorically (and ludicrously) compares his losses of innocence in the jungle and in the bedroom. Ms. Suvari’s Catherine is so extravagantly monstrous that Mr. Huston’s David, who provides a desultory narration, comes across as an inert nonentity.
Of the many howlers in a film that has a sickly bleached palette and a soupy soundtrack, my favorite is David’s haughty warning: “You know, you want to be careful about absinthe. It tastes exactly like remorse, and yet it takes it away.”
Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden (2010)
Directed by: John Irvin
Starring: Jack Huston, Mena Suvari, Richard E. Grant, Caterina Murino, Carmen Maura, Matthew Modine, Richard E. Grant, Mathias Koie Levi Palsvig, Álvaro Roig, María Miguel, Isabella Orlowska
Screenplay by: James Scott Linville
Production Design by: Tim Hutchinson
Cinematography by: Ashley Rowe
Film Editing by: Jeremy Gibbs
Costume Design by: Alexandra Byrne
Set Decoration by: Bárbara Pérez-Solero
Art Direction by: Jonathan McKinstry
Music by: Roger Julià
MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content, nudity and some language.
Distributed by: Roadside Attractions
Release Date: December 10, 2010