MOVIE REVIEW : Actors Over the Top in ‘Hemingway’

Actors, when they’re in their tour-de-force mode, sometimes glom onto aggressively silly or sentimental roles for dear life. “Wrestling Ernest Hemingway” (selected theaters) has not one but two of these roles.

Robert Duvall plays Walter, a retired Cuban barber in south Florida, and Richard Harris is Frank, an Irish ex-sea captain. The movie is supposed to be about how these two disparate gents become friends, but it’s really about scenery eating. And the scenery looks to be none too tasty.

Duvall’s munching is a nibble compared to Harris’. Walter is a finicky loner who goes to the park at the same time every day and eats his bacon sandwiches like clockwork and is cultivating a mildly flirtatious connection with a local waitress (Sandra Bullock). Walter always looks as if he’s about to vanish off the face of the Earth. Self-effacement suits him. Frank, on the other hand, is a blustery blowhard who keeps making a grab for his landlady (Shirley MacLaine) and continually spins a whopper about how he once wrestled--and bested--Ernest Hemingway.

Director Randa Haines and screenwriter Steve Conrad--he was 21 when he wrote the script--have a few whoppers of their own to share. The movie is a tall tale with every sentimental stop pulled: fireworks, clasped hands, swan songs. Walter and Frank may be the most romantic couple in the movies right now--it’s codger love.

“Wrestling Ernest Hemingway” is such a bathetic wallow that it makes you wonder if anybody connected with it ever met anyone over 50. Why is it that so many Hollywood movies, especially “Cocoon” and “Fried Green Tomatoes” and “Used People” and now this one (with “Grumpy Old Men” on deck) insist on showing off old people as a bunch of soppy cantankerous coots? (At least the filmmakers don’t have Walter and Frank rob a bank or win a salsa dance-a-thon.)

Duvall and Harris, both playing older than their actual ages, seem to be having a high old time acting crotchety and infirm. Harris is so over-the-top that at times he’s like a roadshow Ahab. Duvall is quieter, better, though he’s so enamored by Walter’s persnickety politeness that he may not realize the role is wafer-thin. Duvall overacts as much as Harris does, but his way of overacting is to underact: He loads up on tiny gestures and vocal inflections. (Meryl Streep is a piker in the accent department compared to Duvall; his Cuban accent here is letter-perfect.)

Just in case we’re having trouble sinking into all the life-affirming mush, Haines drags the film out to just over two hours, and it feels like three. There are some nice, glancing moments between the two actors, and a strong scene between Harris and MacLaine when he comes on too strong to her and then backs off and we realize she’s as lonely as he is. But most of the time the film slogs along to its predictable conclusion. You may feel as if you’re aging right along with Walter and Frank.

‘Wrestling Ernest Hemingway’

Robert Duvall Walter

Richard Harris Frank

Shirley MacLaine Helen

Sandra Bullock Elaine

A Warner Bros. release of a Joe Wizan/Todd Black production. Director Randa Haines. Producer Joe Wizan, Todd Black. Screenplay Steve Conrad. Cinematographer Lajos Koltai. Editor Paul Hirsch. Costumes Joe I. Tompkins. Music Michael Convertino. Production design Waldemar Kalinowski. Art director Alan E. Muraoka. Set designer Carlos Arditti. Set decorator Florence Fellman. Sound Michael R. Tromer. Running time: 2 hours, 2 minutes.

MPAA-rating: PG-13, for language. Times guidelines: It includes mild sexual carousing and obscenities.