Review: Across the River and Into the Trees — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Across the River and Into the Trees

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

Stars: Liev Schreiber, Matilda De Angelis, Josh Hutcherson, Danny Huston

Writer: Peter Flannery (Based on Ernest Hemingway’s novel)

Director: Paula Ortiz

When Ernest Hemingway published Across the River and Into the Trees in 1950, Tennessee Williams called it “the saddest novel in the world.” Seventy years on, the world has experienced more than its share of collective sadness, but the solemn cadences of Hemingway’s infinitely focused tale of a dying soldier grasping at one last straw of youth still resonate with awful authenticity.

Finally finding its way to the screen in muted colors and understated performances, Hemingway’s story, set in Venice near the end of World War II, floats like an unmoored gondola, pushed and pulled by tides of regret and despair. Colonel Richard Cantwell (Liev Schreiber) has arrived in Venice ostensibly for a bit of R&R, planning a duck hunt in a nearby lagoon. But his eyes betray the bitter truth that this trip is less about recreation than reckoning with a life of virtually uninterrupted war—and finding the site of a rumored mass execution. His progress is slow, yet urgent: Cantwell’s Army doctor (Danny Huston) has warned him of a heart condition that could kill him at any moment.

“I have death sewn into the lining of my clothes,” Cantwell tells his young driver (The Hunger Games’ Josh Hutcherson), and Schreiber’s world-weary delivery of that line leaves no doubt.

Virtually empty of residents, the sidewalks and bridges of Venice are for Cantwell a labyrinth for the contemplation of his life path. He first befriends, then commences a somber romance with an 18-year-old woman named Renata (doe-eyed Italian actress Matilda De Angelis), who tenderly tries to draw from him the reasons for his obvious melancholy. But while Cantwell’s affection for her grows — and we become increasingly uneasy about his paternal/romantic attitude toward her — he never quite offers the insight she seeks.

Eventually, we learn the real reason Cantwell is so determined to hunt ducks on a remote lagoon — and the devastating secret behind that rumored massacre. And, as Williams observed, it’s all terribly, tragically sad.

Befitting Hemingway’s iceberg-like approach to storytelling — with the salient facts often hidden below the surface of his characters’ actions — few actors do more with less than Schreiber (TV’s Ray Donovan). The onetime Hunk of the Moment has aged into a pleasingly jowly leading man; those deep-set blue eyes, framed by eyebrows that have lives of their own, are as piercing as they were when we met him in the Scream movies nearly 30 years ago. His Cantwell, guarded and tortured, moves with stiff resolve, driven to proceed through the final stages of his life despite the crippling pain, physical and emotional, that is eating him alive.

While filmmakers around the world suffered due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Italian director Paula Ortiz discovered a tragically perfect environment for filming this particular story in 2020 Venice. Its gondolas stored away, its canals and walks vacant of tourists, Venice was, in this slim window, as empty and lifeless as it was in the waning days of World War II. As Cantwell and Renata stand atop the Rialto Bridge overlooking the Grand Canal (a traffic jam of water taxis and tourist boats in the slowest of seasons) is bereft of humanity as far as the eye can see. Sitting alone in a St. Mark’s Square café, Cantwell may as well be sipping caffè lungo somewhere on Mars.

All of which introduces another, if subliminal, layer of solemnity to Across the River and Into the Trees, a movie that offers the useful reminder that film doesn’t always have to make you want to stand up and cheer.

Of course, “stand up and cheer” sells books, and most critics of the time dismissed the original novel as a self-indulgent downer. Considering this film has taken more than two years to make it to release, clearly there are those in the film industry who agree.

It requires no literary heroism to agree with the guy who wrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but I’m going with Tennessee Williams’ observation: After reflecting on the book’s unrelenting sadness, he added, it was “the finest thing Hemingway has done.”

Sometimes it’s good to feel bad.