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Hemingway’s Worst Novel Is Now a Slightly Better Movie
In Across the River and Into the Trees, a tortured Liev Schreiber wanders romantically through postwar Venice.
With his wide face, white beard, sad eyes, and a chest somehow both barrel-shaped and concave, the actor brings a hint of the wounded, rueful poet to the part of the weary Colonel Richard Cantwell, an American veteran of both World Wars now wandering aimlessly through postwar Venice. One doesn’t need to know all this to understand or appreciate Paula Ortiz’s film of Across the River and Into the Trees, which takes Hemingway’s ambling, memory-inflected tale and fashions it into a melancholy love story, focusing largely on Cantwell’s romantic conversations and wanderings through Venice with a young, questioning countess, Renata, played by Matilda De Angelis. De Angelis is radiant — veteran Spanish cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe contrasts the smooth, luminous beauty of her features with the grizzled, combat-zone roughness of Schreiber’s — and the actress has captured the ethereal nature of Renata, who serves in the novel as a figure of both emotional reconciliation and death.
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