Ken Burns made his bones with uniquely styled long-form documentaries of epic sweep. The Civil War. Baseball. Jazz. His more recent contributions (often joined in the director’s chair by co-producer Lynn Novick) cover big topics like Prohibition, World War II, country music, and Vietnam.
Only once has he narrowed his focus to eponyms. But even that outlier, 2014’s The Roosevelts, used a spotlight broad enough to illuminate three separate characters — Teddy, Franklin, and Eleanor — spread out over two generations. By contrast, Burns/Novick’s newest opus is the first in their oeuvre to set its sights on a single individual. Not surprisingly, their subject is famous enough to be known by a single name: Hemingway.
Although he’s not history’s most famous English-language writer (Shakespeare’s not giving up the title anytime soon), only Mark Twain rivals Ernest Hemingway for wearing that crown on American soil; and Hemingway made a far more significant impact on the art of fiction, tacking away from the era’s cutting-edge modernism (practiced by the likes of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner) to form his own vanguard, a “terse, declarative style,” says Peter Coyote (a Burns/Novick staple) in voiceover, that “eliminated everything but what was necessary and strengthening.” With that style — which he himself said used only words that could be understood by anyone with a high-school education — Hemingway sold tens of millions of books, won a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize, and placed multiple works in the English literary canon.
But all this can be gleaned from Wikipedia. Burns/Novick’s big hook is Hemingway’s deeply flawed, highly idiosyncratic humanity, a bigger-than-life life with a scope almost as broad as any of the filmmakers’ earlier subjects.
Hemingway is told in three two-hour episodes. Among the life-defining tidbits covered in Episode 1 (“The Writer”) are a mother who sometimes dressed him as a girl, a depressive streak that eventually resulted in four suicides among his eight-member nuclear family, and a first newspaper job with a style sheet exhorting short sentences/paragraphs, “vigorous English,” and an avoidance of adjectives.
But much of the most striking Hemingway material is the treasure trove of photographic and film footage. Although most of us picture “Papa” as the paunchy, mustachioed, overly tan middle-aged man he would become, for his first quarter-century Hemingway was a clean-shaven, well-built youth with movie-star good looks. We even get a few frames of film featuring the handsome teenage ambulance driver in Italy during World War I.
By the end of Episode 1, Hemingway’s hard living is already catching up with him. But with The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and the feted short story collection In Our Time in his rearview mirror, at 30 he’s atop the literary world. Episode 2 (“The Avatar”) devotes much time exploring the mythological Hemingway, a myth largely of the man’s own making, even though the facts should have been more than enough: he was an active participant in no less than three wars (and displaced by a fourth). He covered the D-Day landing from a troop transport off the shore of Omaha Beach. He refereed boxing matches for fun. He survived two plane crashes in two days. Etc. Etc.
To discuss Hemingway’s work, the filmmakers enlist a small array of scholars and authors Edna O’Brien, Tobias Woolf, and Mario Vargas Llosa. They’re all big fans — but not always of the same works. For example, whereas Llosa regards The Old Man and the Sea as Hemingway’s masterpiece, O’Brien labels it “adolescent,” “schoolboy writing.”
But perhaps the most poignant meditation on Hemingway’s output comes from John McCain, the senator and decorated war veteran who died in 2018. Although Llosa finds much of it laughable, McCain cites For Whom the Bell Tolls, the 1940 novel concerning an idealistic young American’s experience fighting against the fascists during the Spanish Civil War, as his all-time favorite book. “Robert Jordan [i.e., the protagonist] is as real to me as you are,” McCain says. “[…] I always wanted to be Robert Jordan.” He goes on to read a particularly personal passage that sends extra shivers considering how it comes to us now from beyond the grave: “‘The world is a fine place and very much worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.’”
No-one will mistake Hemingway for hagiography, discussing as it does his intermittent tendencies toward emotional cruelty and physical violence (including with his four wives), his lifelong “pleasure in killing [animals],” and a journalistic ethos that could be “despicably opportunistic,” such as his omitting all reference to Soviet atrocities during the Spanish Civil War for the sake of the angle he wanted for his articles.
For all that, Burns/Novick sometimes seem to shy away from just how ugly the truth could be. In examining Hemingway’s racism, for example, the filmmakers redact the word “nigger” from his correspondence and manuscripts — the kind of thing they never did in earlier docs, including The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, and as recently as 2017 in The Vietnam War. 
A far more glaring sanitization, however, is Hemingway’s homophobia, which is completely ignored despite its seemingly obvious and deep-seated significance in a man renowned for desperate machismo while apparently repressing his own sexual ambiguity until late in life. You’d never know from Hemingway that the man said anything along the lines of what he wrote to close friend Bill Smith in 1925 [all of the following sic]: “[W]hen a male competes agin the fairy on his own grounds he loses out on acct. the fairy will do stuff to get on that a male is barred from. No Fairy ever starved nor was hungry. [… T]he Royal Road to quick Literary success is through the entrance to the colon. Gaw it disgusts a male. There’s a homosexual claque that make a guy overnight. Once in with the buggaring pooblic he’s made.”
Nonetheless, Hemingway well succeeds in exploring his complicated legacy and humanizing the man away from his myth. And for all his failings, even if (like me) you’re not really a fan of his work, it’s hard not to feel for the recent Nobel Prize-winner in Episode 3 (“The Blank Page”), just 55 but seeming decades older from a lifetime of alcohol abuse and numerous traumatic brain injuries, as he limps through one of his extremely rare on-camera interviews, so fractured that at times he actually enunciates the punctuation on the cue cards at his feet: “The book that I am writing on at present is about Africa, [pause] its people [pause] in the park that I know them, the animals, comma, and the changes [pause] in Africa since I was there last, period.”
Ernest Hemingway’s depiction of humanity, both faltering and triumphant, is the undeniably great part of his artistry. Likewise, it’s the exploration of the author’s own complex humanity that makes Hemingway worth every minute of its six-hour runtime. And knowing about his sad end before beginning the miniseries makes it all the more affecting. “Everybody knows life is a tragic show, i.e., born here, die there,” Hemingway wrote as a young man. Between here and there was quite a life.
The three-part miniseries Hemingway — featuring the vocal talents of Jeff Daniels, Meryl Streep, Keri Russell, Mary-Louise Parker, and Patricia Clarkson — premieres 8–10pm April 5, 6 and 7 on PBS.