Hemingway & Gellhorn

Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012) is an HBO biographical drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Philip Kaufman with Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen in the lead roles. Kidman plays Martha Gellhorn — a war correspondent who covered nearly every major conflict of the twentieth century — and Owen takes on Ernest Hemingway at the height of his fame and his worst impulses.

They first crossed paths at a Florida bar in 1936 and, weeks later, found themselves side by side in Civil War Spain. The five years of their marriage stretched across China, Finland and wartime Europe, fuelled by shared recklessness and a growing inability to tolerate each other. Gellhorn filed for divorce before Hemingway thought to — a fact history has treated as a footnote, though the film does not.

At 155 minutes, the film gives both figures room to be difficult and contradictory rather than iconic. Kidman's performance is stripped of sentiment: Gellhorn is ambitious, exacting, and unwilling to shrink. That makes this one of the more honest portraits of the era's celebrity writers that American television has produced. Stream Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012) online on iFILM.