Ernest Hemingway is known, as a writer, for his terse, muscular prose; but also for a life in which he seemed to be trying to play act the man who (in his his own imagination) should properly have written his books. Hemongway drank, womanized, hunted, fished and fought; and sadly burnt himself out, committing suicide whilst struggling with his mental health at the age of only sixty-one. Burns and Novak's documentary doesn't make him out to be a monster, exactly; but one does get the sense of someone who grew over-accustomed to being the main act in their own life. There's a faint air of reverent tragedy to this series; but perhaps that comes from its own subject, who was always measuring himself against greatness, and at the same time, for death.
Review of Hemingway
