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Hemingway's Garden of Eden



Showtimes | Official site

Directed by: John Irvin

Starring: Mena Suvari, Jack Huston, Caterina Murino, Richard E. Grant and Carmen Maura

Run time: 111 minutes

MPAA rating: R (strong sexual content, nudity and some language)

Synopsis: Based on Ernest Hemingway's unfinished final novel.

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That's small consolation for acting as wooden as a small forest and little chemistry among the leads in a story that is meant to be combustible with repressed but fiery passions.

Jack Huston is David Bourne, an American in post-World War I Europe struggling to make it as a writer. Across the proverbial crowded room one day, his eyes lock on a fellow American, Catherine (Mena Suvari). They fall into a whirlwind romance that quickly leads to marriage.

But rich and spoiled Catherine is easily bored and, in a move that no doubt would have brought scandal to proper ladies of the Jazz Age, she invites Marita (Caterina Murino), an Italian woman they meet in a cafe, into a romantic triangle. Of course, the snake of envy writhes into the couple's once idyllic relationship, poisoning everything in its path.


It's all supposed to radiate a sense of finding mad love on the knife's edge of danger but, under the direction of John Irvin (The Dogs of War ) from a script by James Scott Linville, it just seems like a bunch of actors playing dress-up.

Hemingway's Garden of Eden was made in 2008 and apparently has been sitting on the shelf for a couple of years. Little wonder.

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