Hemingway’s Worst Novel Gets Worse: ‘Across the River’ Is a Dull, Pointless Misfire

Does anyone know how to make a movie these days that makes sense, with enough plot, narrative coherence and character development to keep a viewer from falling asleep? Hope springs eternal, but the answer, from almost everything I’ve seen lately, is no.

The newest time-waster is Across the River and Into the Trees, a dismal disappointment based on the last full-length novel written by Ernest Hemingway and published to abysmal reviews in 1950 (later came The Old Man and the Sea, but that was a short novella, not a novel). Now, more than 70 years later and for reasons unexplained, along comes a dull, pointless movie version of Across the River, proving Hemingway’s worst book has not improved with age. Director Paula Ortiz, obviously obsessed with the source material but understandably realizing how resistant it has always been to film, has changed practically everything about the book, including the plot, the characters and even the postwar years in which it takes place. Nothing, I regret to say, helps. It’s lifeless as a stump, and destined for box-office doom.

In the novel, irascible American army colonel Richard Cantwell returns to Venice after World War I, driven to his rendezvous with the beautiful young countess Renata Contarini while suffering from a terminal heart condition, remembering both the passion of their romance and the beauty of the most beautiful city in Italy and died, leaving readers scratching their heads with frustration, wondering how a work of such emptiness could emanate from so exalted a literary source. For this new version of the story, the time is updated until shortly after World War II, and the colonel now meets Renata when she is moonlighting as the driver of a water taxi on the Grand Canal. She is preparing for her wedding, but for reasons not altogether plausible, she devotes enough days and nights to her sudden infatuation with the gruff, crude colonel to fall in love. He is played by Liev Schreiber, a dour, sour-faced actor who never smiles, without a shred of humor or irony. Worse still, Cantwell suffers from a coronary thrombosis, popping nitroglycerine, smoking incessantly and dangerously swigging booze.

When all else fails, there is always Venice, but as the humorless American military man and his lovely Italian guide meander around the historic treasures, cobblestone alleys and moonlit canals (gorgeously photographed by cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, I dare you to say that one three times in a row without reaching for a valium) he invests less time enjoying the always restorative pleasure of sitting under the moon listening to a jazz orchestra in the Piazza San Marco, and more time being tortured with guilt about a wartime ambush in a nearby town that cost the lives of 338 men. He quotes Stonewall Jackson and after Renata’s wedding, pretends to go duck hunting, but after the sound of his rifle is heard, the camera pans the lake, the boat is empty, and no dead duck falls from the sky on its way to a dish of duck l’orange. Despite the muted talk about love, death, growing old, war and pasta, you can draw your own conclusions. A few tender scenes are enlivened by the beautiful and charm of Schreiber’s co-star Matilda De Angelis, an enchanting newcomer who lights up the screen as Countess Renata, but the dreary screenplay by Peter Flannery fails to find a dramatic thread that makes this a movie worth sitting through, and Schreiber never gets anywhere near the key to colonel’s heart and soul.

I didn’t think it possible to make a boring movie about Venice, but this one manages to do so.