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PBS airs a documentary about the enduring effects of Agent Orange. And the Macy’s annual fireworks display returns to New York in full force.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, June 28-July 4. Details and times are subject to change. More
PBS airs a documentary about a New Jersey coffin maker and his mentees. And the final episode of “Conan” airs on TBS.MondayINDEPENDENT LENS: TWO GODS (2021) 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Hanif, a coffin maker in Newark takes a pair of mentees under his wing in this admirable documentary from the filmmaker Zeshawn Ali. Through intimate black-and-white footage, the film delves into Hanif’s life, and the way that his guidance bolsters his young students. Ali does this with “a matter-of-fact compassion,” Nicolas Rapold wrote in his review for The New York Times. “He cuts efficiently without turning anyone into a case study.” More
HILLSBOROUGH, Calif. — Live from his home kitchen in the Bay Area, Martin Yan flashed a smile, raised his cleaver and chanted the catchphrase that the 150 or so people watching him online were clamoring to hear: “If Yan can cook, so can you!” More
He conceived and produced “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” and was its face for 20 years, after four decades as an NBC News correspondent.Bob Abernethy, who capped a four-decade career as an NBC News correspondent by injecting religion, one of the most under-covered subjects on television, into national programming with a weekly series that ran for 20 years on PBS, died on May 2 in Brunswick, Maine. He was 93.His death, at a heath care facility, was confirmed by his daughter Jane Montgomery Abernethy. The cause was Alzheimer’s dementia.The grandson of a Baptist minister in Washington whose congregation included President Warren G. Harding and Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, Mr. Abernethy had retired from NBC in 1994 after covering the collapse of the Soviet Union, the nascent space program and Congress.He was not ready to stop working, though. Armed with his deep faith, intellectual curiosity and a theology degree he had earned from Yale Divinity School during a one-year leave of absence in 1984, he persuaded WNET, the PBS station in New York, to produce “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly,” a half-hour nonsectarian series that Mr. Abernethy hosted and presided over as executive editor beginning in 1997.Within 10 years of its launch, the show — which Mr. Abernethy had described as “a news program, no preaching” — was airing on 250 public stations nationwide, winning some 200 industry awards. He and his collaborators went on to broadcast regularly until 2017, when he was 89.With the journalist William Bole, Mr. Abernethy edited “The Life of Meaning: Reflections on Faith, Doubt, and Repairing the World,” (2007), an anthology of interview transcripts from the PBS program.“Nothing I have done has been as personally satisfying as founding and working on” the program, he wrote in the introduction to the book, adding, “The main reason for that is the many opportunities the show provides for sitting down with the likes of Archbishop Desmond Tutu — extraordinary men and women who speak as naturally about their faith and doubt and spiritual practices as they do about the weather.”Mr. Abernethy in an undated photo. He persuaded PBS to produce “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly,” becoming its host and executive producer.David HollowayOther guests included the Dalai Lama, President Jimmy Carter, the Rev. Billy Graham and Jonathan Sacks, at the time the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom.The series covered a wide range of topics, including atheism, abortion, assisted suicide, sexual abuse by clergy and organ transplants.“Finding this line between sensitivity to the spiritual dimensions of a story on the one hand and objective, traditional skepticism is a constant struggle and a very appropriate one, but I think we’ve got it right,” Mr. Abernethy told The Washington Post in 2000. “This is a matter of good reporting. Unless you get the spiritual element of the story, you’re missing something very important. It’s like interviewing Babe Ruth and not asking about hitting.”When “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” was approaching the end of its run, Jerome Socolovsky, the editor in chief of Religion News Service, was rueful, telling the news service Current in 2016, “The media landscape will miss this crucial provider of video stories about religion that didn’t favor one or the other but gave viewers a full perspective on religious news developments.”Robert Gordon Abernethy was born on Nov. 5, 1927, in Geneva to Robert and Lois May (Jones) Abernethy. His father worked for the Y.M.C.A.’s international newspaper. After Bob was born, the couple returned to the United States. His father began to teach religion at the Hill School in Pottstown, Pa., but died of complications of appendicitis in 1930.Bob and his mother moved in with his paternal grandparents in Washington, where his grandfather was senior minister of Calvary Baptist Church. She taught piano at the National Cathedral School.After graduating from the Hill School, he enrolled in Princeton University but interrupted his studies to serve with the American occupying Army in postwar Japan, where he hosted a program for Armed Forces Radio. Returning to college, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from what is now the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.Coming from a family of pastors, he felt “a certain amount of pressure on me to become a minister, too,” he told the website Resources for Christianity in 2013, “but I never heard a call.”Mr. Abernethy married Jean Montgomery in 1951; she died in 1980. In addition to their daughter, Jane, he is survived by his second wife, Marie (Grove) Abernethy, whom he married in 1984; their daughter, Elizabeth C. Abernethy; and four children from Ms. Abernethy’s first marriage. He had homes in Brunswick as well as in Washington and Jaffrey, N.H.Mr. Abernethy was a member of the United Church of Christ. His wife is a member of the Russian Orthodox Church.He joined NBC News after receiving his master’s from Princeton in 1952. Early on he wrote and hosted “Update,” a program for young people, and was later a Washington interviewer for the “Today” show. He anchored the evening news for KNBC in Los Angeles among other assignments.One posting was to Moscow, after he had completed his leave from NBC News to study theology in 1984. Before he left, he recalled: “I ran into a guy I had known who asked me, ‘What’s new?’ I said, ‘I took a year’s leave from NBC and went to divinity school. I got married and we had a baby. What’s new with you?’”He never stopped working. At his death, he was hoping to document the lives of homeless people through video interviews, for a future broadcast. More
A lusty new production is both an enticement and a warning as we tentatively explore intimacy after a year of forced solitude.What will be the idiom, in my modest estimation, to best define our relationship to sex during the Covid-19 pandemic? “Stay home if you sick, come over if you thicc” — so say the boys of Tinder.It’s not quite Shakespeare — or is it? I’m willing to bet that if they lived in 2021, Romeo and Juliet would quickly become fluent in our contemporary language of lust and seduction. After all, sex has always been an element of Shakespeare’s play, though portrayals of it have changed in productions over the last 400 years, depending on trends and cultural attitudes.So it would make sense, after the pandemic year we’ve had, that we’re in for a spate of sexy Shakespeare — frilly ruff and all. And “Romeo and Juliet” — including the lusty new filmed production that premiered last week on PBS — looks like it’ll be the play of this spicy summer to come.I’ve already encountered other renditions in the last couple of weeks: the Public Theater’s bilingual “Romeo y Julieta,” the Actors Theater of Louisville’s “Romeo & Juliet: Louisville 2020.” An interactive production is forthcoming from England’s Creation Theater.Though a play about intimacy, yearning and death feels right for the moment, I have to admit my discomfort with all those honeyed kisses and sweet nothings: The pandemic has left me unprepared for lovers meeting at any distance closer than six feet.The sexiness of “Romeo and Juliet” depends not just on a director but on the temperature of the times, whether the drafty climate of a chaste family dinner with Granny or the febrile blaze of a Friday night date set to a playlist of ’90s R&B jams.Though the Elizabethans of Shakespeare’s time were down for lewd wordplay and suggestive winks in the text, stage depictions of physical intimacy were a step too far. The Victorians? Stuffier than a mouth breather during allergy season, they tended to shift the story toward innocent love rather than lust.Romeo and Juliet got a movie makeover in the 1960s, however, when the director Franco Zeffirelli premiered his sensual adaptation, including a famous nude love scene, during the peak of the sexual revolution.And if you had a pulse in the ’90s you caught Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in Baz Luhrmann’s wistfully romantic “Romeo and Juliet,” which seemed charged by the melancholic sighs of disenchanted youth — appropriate for the decade of irony and grunge.Orlando Bloom, left, and Condola Rashad in the 2013 Broadway production of “Romeo and Juliet.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhich presents the question of where we are now. (The dull and curiously sexless 2013 Broadway production, starring Orlando Bloom and Condola Rashad, had little to add.) Have dating apps and the sex-positive and body-positive movements brought us to a new age of uninhibitedness?Honestly, I’m not sure. Many of our austere cultural standards around sex, cuffed to religious conventions, economics and antiquated notions about gender, still haunt us behind closed doors — even as much of our media uses sex as consumer currency. But a pandemic that made isolation the rule surely has changed our relationship to physical intimacy.That — not personal prudishness or naïveté — is why too sexy of a “Romeo and Juliet,” like the new filmed edition starring Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor, leaves me scandalized, as though I didn’t grow up in a household with HBO.The fabric of the film feels cut from the central couple’s marital bedsheets — the intimacy is that palpable. Scene after scene feels like it’s taking place by candlelight. The hovering camerawork peeks over shoulders to catch a kiss or embrace.Cutting many of the play’s crass euphemisms (including the nurse’s many opinions on matters of the heart and, well, other parts of the body), this “Romeo and Juliet” builds from the physical tension among the characters.They tease one another, as Mercutio does Romeo and Benvolio in his Queen Mab’s speech; then he draws in Benvolio (depicted here as his lover) for a single electric moment before promptly shoving him away.Simon Godwin’s direction is tactile, obsessed with hands and the ways an open-palmed welcome, a single-finger caress, the taut-knuckled hardness of a fist can signify romance, or violence, or both.The confidential meeting of the lovers in the tussle of bodies at the Capulet shindig, the hesitant first touch of their fingers and, later, the urgent consummation — none of this is surprising. Neither is it risqué.And yet, to me, it felt alarming — pornographic even — given how we have spent the last year painfully aware of what threats proximity could breed.Last spring NYC Health released a much-mocked guide to safe sex during the pandemic, encouraging masturbation as the most Covid-friendly alternative to, in Shakespearean terms, sheathing one’s dagger. No more sweaty tangling of limbs in a dark bar, no more post-date kiss on the sidewalk outside a restaurant. Or at least not without risk.Even as more of us get vaccinated, intimacy will likely feel like a fresh adventure, for good and for bad. Some singles are emerging from their quarantine bubbles anticipating a “hot vax summer” of horny hookups and experimental exploits. Others are circumspect, our social skills atrophied and our inhibitions increased in response to a lethal disease.For the next several months, as we recover from a kind of intimacy-deprived PTSD, Shakespeare’s sexiest play — a play that links lust to violence, even death — may read as extreme, even subtly subversive.That’s the magic of the Bard, isn’t it? Racy enough for reprobates and rakes, or priggishly read by a congregation of stately stiff-backs, the work is spacious enough to accommodate any disposition. I might be too shy to subscribe to Romeo and Juliet’s steamy OnlyFans, but, hey, there are plenty out there who aren’t. More
Josh O’Connor and Jessie Buckley star as the star-crossed lovers in a compelling stage-film hybrid adaptation.What’s written in haste may be repaired in haste. Or so the fine and fleet new “Romeo and Juliet” from Britain’s National Theater, available here on PBS’s “Great Performances,” convinces me.At 90 minutes, it is even shorter than the “two hours’ traffic of our stage” promised in its first lines but rarely honored in performance. (The entire play normally takes about three hours.) Yet as directed by Simon Godwin, this emotionally satisfying and highly theatrical filmed version scores point after point while whizzing past, or outright cutting, the elements that can make you think it was written not by Shakespeare but by O. Henry on a bender.If the cutting merely left what remains with a much higher proportion of penetrating insight and powerful feeling, that would be enough; “Romeo and Juliet,” at its best, anticipates the great later works in which complexity and ambivalence are made real and gorgeous in language. But the speed serves another function here: telling a story that’s mostly about teenagers with a teenage intensity and recklessness.Not that the stars are anywhere near their adolescence. Though Romeo is 17 or so and Juliet, 13, Josh O’Connor, who played mopey young Prince Charles in “The Crown,” is 30, and Jessie Buckley, the mysterious star of “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” 31. Still, there’s a reason they’re called actors: They can perform the acts a play requires of them. Onstage, at any rate, that would be sufficient.Under Simon Godwin’s direction, the masked ball in this “Romeo and Juliet” is closer to a rave.Rob YoungsonOn film, we need an extra push, which Godwin and Emily Burns, who adapted the text, provide by grounding us in a theatrical world before escorting us into a filmic one. The production begins unceremoniously with the cast in street clothes, entering a theater, unmasked and vulnerable, none more so than O’Connor, with the low-slung, “sticky-out” ears he says earned him his role on “The Crown.” Sitting on three sides of a small, square, scuffed playing space, the actors are barely past the greeting phase — O’Connor and Buckley smile shyly at one another, as if across a Veronese piazza — when the play leaps out of the gate.Purists not already offended will soon have plenty to set them off. The masked ball at which the lovers meet is not exactly courtly; it’s more like a rave, and Romeo is given just two lines (instead of 10) to fall for Juliet, who is moaning at the mic like Lana Del Rey.But impurists will be satisfied that the erotic intensity between them is so palpable, even when Godwin dissipates it by cutting away from the theatrical moment to a filmed montage in some other dimension. Similarly, the introduction of a passionate gay pairing among the supporting roles makes up in thematic coherence — the plot turns on forbidden love — what it lacks in textual fidelity.The trade-offs continue throughout. The most fascinating one finds Juliet’s parents inverted, Lady Capulet (Tamsin Greig) getting most of the lines Shakespeare wrote for her Lord (Lloyd Hutchinson). Greig, so funny on the Showtime series “Episodes,” is spectacularly entertaining as she explores what besides the habitual assertion of male power might motivate a parent to threaten a daughter with expulsion. Her interpretation, underlined by “evil” music, nevertheless denatures one key feature of the play, which now suggests that the Capulets are monsters when the really terrifying thing is that they’re not. They are upstanding citizens doing what’s expected.It is that atmosphere of immutable custom and inherited hatred that the lovers are desperate to escape. But Godwin’s staging makes clear by physical proximity and by judicious intercutting that these elements are related: Romeo and Juliet’s passion is as rash and irrational as the other characters’ repression and violence. As the outlines of their love are filled in, so is the hatred around them — and so are the set (by Soutra Gilmour) and props; swords that were simple wooden dowels in Act I by Act III are knives that look menacingly real. In youth, it seems, enmity precedes an enemy just as love precedes a lover.Tamsin Greig as Lady Capulet and Lloyd Hutchinson as Lord Capulet.Rob YoungsonAt every turn we are offered insights like that until, suddenly, we aren’t. Nothing Godwin can do to make the play rough and unfamiliar — whether by having Tybalt (David Judge) urinate on a wall or by excising greatest hits like “parting is such sweet sorrow” — can help it get past the place where the lovers’ ingenuity fails along with Shakespeare’s. The plot thread by which Juliet’s fake death prompts Romeo’s real one is so absurdly flimsy that adaptations have tried for centuries to fix it; Arthur Laurents’s workaround for “West Side Story” is especially strong.For me, though, no production of “Romeo and Juliet” survives the potions of Friar Laurence; they are a lot of magick to swallow in a play about such real and serious things. That Laurence is portrayed here (by Lucian Msamati) with great dignity, not as a nutty professor, helps, raising the profound if wishful idea that faith can correct for society’s failings. Even more movingly, Deborah Findlay, as Juliet’s fond nurse, is able to temper the role’s comic elements with an immutable loyalty to her mistress, and then temper that with something darker and arguably in fact disloyal. It’s a perfect trifold performance.That’s the thing about Shakespeare, at least for me: There comes a moment in many of his plays when only the actors can preserve the emotion the plot keeps leaking. Happily, that happens here: As the tragedy narrows, O’Connor and Buckley flood with feeling.Stars will do that. In the same way an enemy is just a receptacle for enmity that already exists, a starring role is whatever a star can pour ambient emotion into. O’Connor’s essence is a silent yearning — the kind that is not extinguished but fanned by satisfaction. (This is what made his otherwise insufferable Charles almost sympathetic in “The Crown” and the nearly silent young farmer in his breakthrough film, “God’s Own Country,” so expressive.) Buckley, whose face seems transparent at times, is more about wonder; her Juliet clearly wants Romeo but, more than that, is amazed by her good fortune in getting him.Even in a more conventional production — this one was meant to be performed live onstage but was retooled for the pandemic — you need that kind of incandescence to make the play make sense. Remember that Shakespeare was a young star, too, albeit 30 or so himself, when he wrote “Romeo and Juliet.” Indeed, it often seems that his title characters, in haste and passion, wrote it for him.Romeo & JulietThrough May 21; pbs.org/gperf More
Lynn Novick and Ken Burns revisit the life of Ernest Hemingway on PBS. And a documentary about a civil suit against the Ku Klux Klan airs on CNN.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, April 5-11. Details and times are subject to change.MondayHEMINGWAY 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Lynn Novick and Ken Burns look back at the life of Ernest Hemingway in this new three-part documentary, which airs over three consecutive nights beginning on Monday. The program aims to give an evenhanded assessment of Hemingway’s life and legacy, recognizing the uglier elements (racism and anti-Semitism) while paying tribute to his work. The result is a documentary that is “cleareyed about its subject and emotional about his legacy,” James Poniewozik wrote in his review for The New York Times. “It celebrates his gifts, catalogs his flaws (which included using racist language in his correspondence) and chronicles his decline with the tragic relentlessness its subject would give to the death of a bull in the ring.”TuesdayFOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL (1994) 10 p.m. on TCM. The director Mike Newell and the screenwriter Richard Curtis worked together on this classic British romantic comedy, about two people (played by Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell) whose love develops in fits and starts. It is, Janet Maslin wrote in her review for The Times, “elegant, festive and very, very funny.”WednesdayEXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES 9 p.m. on HBO. Raoul Peck (“I Am Not Your Negro”) blends archival footage, clips from Hollywood movies, scripted scenes and animation into a rumination on the history of European colonialism and American slavery in this new four-part series. The first two parts air on Wednesday at 9 p.m. and 10 p.m.; the second two air on Thursday night at the same times.ThursdayDiane Keaton and Al Pacino in “Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone.”Paramount PicturesMARIO PUZO’S THE GODFATHER, CODA: THE DEATH OF MICHAEL CORLEONE (1990) 6:45 p.m. on Showtime. Should “The Godfather, Coda,” be considered a 1990 release, or a 2020 one? It’s both, really. This re-edited version of the “The Godfather Part III,” released last year, is more than a standard extended director’s cut: Revisiting the film three decades after its original release, the director Francis Ford Coppola tweaked the opening. And the ending. And a lot of material in between, too. The changes are meant to sharpen a trilogy-capping movie that never managed the kind of acclaim that the original “Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II” did. Coppola had originally envisioned the film as “a summing-up and an interpretation of the first two movies, rather than a third movie,” he said in an interview with The Times last year. He had never wanted to use the “Part III” label in the first place. The title, he explained, “was the thread hanging out of the sock that annoyed me, so that led me to pull on the thread.”FridayDOING THE MOST WITH PHOEBE ROBINSON 11 p.m. on Comedy Central. The comedian Phoebe Robinson, known to many as one of the erstwhile co-hosts of the podcast “Two Dope Queens,” is on her own in hosting this new comedy series. Well, sort of: Each episode finds Robinson spending time with a different famous face. She goes horseback riding with the comic Whitney Cummings. She meets Kevin Bacon at a ropes course. The first season also includes appearances from the fashion designer Tan France, the model Ashley Graham, the comedian Hasan Minhaj, the actress Gabrielle Union and several other guests.AMERICAN MASTERS — OLIVER SACKS: HIS OWN LIFE (2021) 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Ken Burns and Lynn Novick are on PBS earlier this week with their new documentary, “Hemingway,” but on Friday night Burns’s younger brother, Ric Burns, gets a turn in the director’s chair. He’s the filmmaker behind this feature-length documentary, which profiles the neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, whose many explorations of the mind turned him into a best-selling author. Burns explores the life of Sacks, who died in 2015 at 82, through a “deftly edited mix of archival footage, still imagery, talking-head interviews and in-the-moment narrative,” Glenn Kenny wrote in his review for The Times. Kenny added that, “while the movie steers around the details of how post-fame Sacks became something of a brand, it beautifully presents a portrait of his compassion and bravery.”SaturdaySidney Flanigan in “Never Rarely Sometimes Always.”Focus FeaturesNEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS (2020) 5:45 p.m. on HBO Signature. A young woman takes a long journey to get an abortion in this latest movie from the filmmaker Eliza Hittman. The story follows Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), a 17-year-old who gets on a bus to New York City after being told that she needs parental permission to obtain an abortion in her home state, Pennsylvania. She’s accompanied by a cousin, Skylar (Talia Ryder), who helps her jump over the many hurdles along the way. The result is a film that “tells a seldom-told story about abortion,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. It does so, Dargis added, “without cant, speeches, inflamed emotions and — most powerfully — without apology.” She included it on her list of the 10 best movies of 2020.SundayBeulah Mae Donald, as seen in “The People v. the Klan.”CNNTHE PEOPLE V. THE KLAN 9 p.m. on CNN. After her son Michael Donald was killed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1981, Beulah Mae Donald successfully sued the hate group for $7 million, in what became a groundbreaking case. Her push for justice is at the heart of this four-part documentary series, which looks back at work by civil rights activists to dismantle the Klan’s power in the 20th century. The program ties those activists’ work to modern movements for justice.2021 BAFTA AWARDS 8 p.m. on BBC America. Chloé Zhao’s Oscars front-runner, “Nomadland,” and the British coming-of-age film “Rocks,” from the filmmaker Sarah Gavron, are the two most-nominated films at this year’s EE British Academy Film Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars. They lead a notably diverse slate of nominees, which comes after BAFTA’s voting rules were overhauled to address criticism of last year’s ceremony, when no people of color were nominated in the main acting categories and no women were nominated for best director. More
Ken Burns’s latest documentary, premiering Monday on PBS, traces the complicated connections between the person, the persona and the storiesOne of the more unsettling moments in “Hemingway,” the latest documentary from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, finds Ernest Hemingway, big-game hunter, chronicler of violence and seeker of danger, doing one thing that terrified him: speaking on television.It is 1954, and the author, who survived airplane crashes (plural) earlier that year in Africa, had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He agreed to an interview with NBC on the condition that he receive the questions in advance and read his answers from cue cards.The rare video clip comes after we’ve spent nearly six hours seeing the author create an image of virile swagger and invent a style of clean, lucid prose. But here Hemingway, an always-anxious public speaker still recuperating from a cerebral injury, is halting and stiff. Asked what he is currently writing about — Africa — his answer includes the punctuation on the card: “the animals comma and the changes in Africa since I was there last period.”It’s hard to watch. But it is one of many angles from which the expansive, thoughtful “Hemingway” shows us the man in full, contrasting the person and the persona, the triumphs and vulnerabilities, to help us see an old story with new eyes.Burns, whose survey of American history is interspersed with biographies of figures like Jackie Robinson, Mark Twain and Frank Lloyd Wright, might have taken on Hemingway at any time over the past few decades. But there is an accidentally timely aspect to many of his timeless subjects. His “National Parks” in 2009, for instance, came in time to echo the Obama-era battles over the role of government.Now “Hemingway,” airing over three nights starting Monday on PBS, comes along as American culture is reconsidering many of its lionized men, from figures on statues to Woody Allen. And there are few authors as associated with masculinity — literary, toxic or otherwise — than the writer who loved it when you called him Papa.It’s tempting to say that Hemingway’s macho bluster doesn’t hold up well in the light of the 21st century, but it didn’t go unnoticed in the 20th either. He embraced manliness as a kind of celebrity performance. He fought with his strong-willed mother, who accused him of having “overdrawn” from the bank of her love. He married four times, finding his next wife before leaving the previous one, wanting each to give herself over to supporting him.He clashed spectacularly with his third wife, the writer Martha Gellhorn (played in voice-over by Meryl Streep), who matched him well, maybe too well to last. A free spirit who resisted marriage at first, saying “I’d rather sin respectably,” Gellhorn would not sideline her ambitions for his. (You might find yourself wishing you were watching her documentary.)The writer Martha Gellhorn was the third of Hemingway’s four wives.John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and MuseumEventually he found a fourth wife, Mary Welsh, who wrote in her diary that he wanted his wives to be “completely obedient and sexually loose.” Hemingway wrote to his son about Gellhorn, “I made a very great mistake on her — or else she changed very much — I think probably both — but mostly the latter.” The journey that sentence takes is a short story in itself.But “Hemingway” also complicates the popular image of Hemingway as he-man woman-hater (or, at least, woman-dismisser) in his life and his work. Starting with his early childhood, when he mother enjoyed “twinning” him and his sister, dressing them identically as boys or as girls, the film argues that Hemingway had an “androgynous” mind-set that disposed him to inhabit male and female perspectives in his work. (He also, the film says, experimented with gender-switching role-play with his lovers.)“Hemingway” takes as a test case the story “Up in Michigan,” which ends with a date rape. It was controversial at the time; Gertrude Stein called it “inaccrochable,” like a painting unsuitable to be hung. But the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien unpacks how Hemingway’s raw, tactile prose centers the woman’s thoughts and sensations. “I would ask his detractors, female or male, just to read that story, and could you in all honor say this was a writer who didn’t understand women’s emotions and hated women?” she asks. “You couldn’t.”O’Brien is no one-sided Hemingway booster. (She dismisses “The Old Man and the Sea” as “schoolboy writing.”) But she is the M.V.P. of a group of literary commentators here that also includes Mario Vargas Llosa, Mary Karr and Tobias Wolff, all of whom help “Hemingway” do the difficult work of describing an internal creative process from the outside.The series lays out how Hemingway stripped away excess from his language so that the reader would supply the emotion and thus feel it more deeply. He was inspired by Paul Cézanne, who would repaint the same view to find new ways of seeing it. He admired Bach for his mastery of repetition and used the device to rhythmic, incantatory effect in his prose.To the usual Burns toolbox of photo pans and archival film, “Hemingway” adds typewriter imagery — keys hammering on pages like irons in a smithy — and animations of manuscript editing.Its most powerful device, though, is the author’s own words. As sometimes happens with Burns’s celebrity voice casting, I found Jeff Daniels as Hemingway distracting at times for his recognizable voice. But Daniels (like Hemingway, a Midwesterner) gives the passages of fiction and memoir a velvet punch.You have to convey the power of the writing, after all, to show how literature is still shaped by Hemingway’s ideas of clarity, of mortality, of gender. “He changed all the furniture in the room,” Wolff says. “And we all have to sit in it.”This is true whether we sit easily or not. “Can you separate the art from the artist?” is a heated and dogmatic argument these days. You must sever the two, in a spirit of see-no-evil, to preserve the precious product; or you must handcuff them together, so that any judgment of a life becomes the judgment on the work, and the work a forensic rap sheet against its creator.Hemingway with his children, from left, Patrick, Jack and Gregory. His big-game hunting and fishing contributed to his image of virile swagger.John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum“Hemingway” doesn’t separate art and artist. Hemingway didn’t either. He created a public “avatar” that sometimes overshadowed his work (and threatened to make him a self-caricature) and wrote his life into his art (sometimes with cruelty toward friends and peers). But the documentary also recognizes that life and art don’t always correlate neatly or simply.The resulting biography is cleareyed about its subject but emotional about his legacy. It celebrates his gifts, catalogs his flaws (which included using racist language in his correspondence) and chronicles his decline with the tragic relentlessness its subject would give to the death of a bull in the ring.The biggest compliment I can pay “Hemingway” is that it made me pull my “Collected Short Stories” off the shelf after years, to read his piercing, full-feeling work in a new light. This life story is not entirely a pretty picture. But to quote its subject, “If it is all beautiful you can’t believe it. Things aren’t that way.” More
