It's amazing that there haven't been more films made about the life of Ernest Hemingway. Unfortunately, the lone representation of him on screen is In Love and War. Yes, that movie with Chris O'Donnell. Snore. The guy lived such a full and eventful life, you'd imagine that Hollywood would have tapped the Hemingway well long ago.
The next adaptation of the man's life is already shaping up to be superior to O'Donnell's opus. According to Variety, Anthony Hopkins has signed on to play the bearded writer in Andy Garcia's Hemingway and Fuentes, a film that will focus on the writer's time in Cuba with his good friend, Gregorio Fuentes. There he met and fell in love with an Italian girl who inspired him to write The Old Man and The Sea. Annette Bening has also signed on to play Hemingway's third wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway. Andy Garcia will play Fuentes as well as direct the script he co-wrote with the granddaughter of Papa.
Apparently Andy Garcia has let this project gestate for quite some time, having first conceived of it in the 1970s, when he was way into fishing. “As an avid fisherman," Garcia said, "I got to know older Cuban fisherman who knew Gregorio from the fishing culture of the 40s and 50s, and who would compete in tournaments outside the city of Havana, which was really the beginning of competitive fishing.” While I'm not all that convinced that a movie about fishing will be entertaining, I don't have to be sold on the idea that Hemingway deserves a decent movie about his life. Garcia can pull it off.
