Like countless writers all over the globe, I heartily subscribe to Ernest Hemingway’s heady goal of trying “to write one true sentence—the truest one you know”
Now, having just seen Bob Yari’s Papa, I will, humbly, try to practise what the master preached.
Watching this fanciful, at times fantastic, look into a portion of Papa’s life while he resided—and at times held court—in Cuba (largely seen from the point of view of Eddie Meyer—an orphan who was embraced and then, essentially, adopted by Mary and Ernest), viewers will come away with a number of interesting facts—along with the apparent madness of the Nobel Prize winner—bur precious little insight into the inner workings of one of the planet’s truly great writers.
(And perhaps most succinctly put by close friend and gangrene-stricken confidante, poet Evan Shipman: “Maybe all geniuses are crazy.”) JWR