‘Papa: Hemingway in Cuba” is the first American feature shot entirely on location in Havana since 1959. The movie makes a good argument for reinstating the American travel ban to the island, at least for Hollywood productions. Shot in 2014 with the assistance of the Cuban Film Institute, on a budget low enough to skate by the U.S. trade embargo policy, this dramatization of the real-life friendship between a former Miami Herald reporter and the legendary author during the late 1950s is as engaging and authentic as a junior high school production of “Death of a Salesman.”
Based on an autobiographical screenplay by Denne Bart Petitclerc, who died in 2006 while trying to develop the movie, the film stars Giovanni Ribisi as Ed Myers, a journalist who was inspired to become a writer after reading Hemingway’s novels in an orphanage during the Depression.
In 1957, now a reporter for The Miami Globe, Ed writes Hemingway a fan letter. The author responds by phoning Ed (“Call me Papa. Everyone does.”) and inviting him to visit his Finca Vigia home in Havana. Ed travels to Cuba, a magical land where happy people play maracas and baseball and pick coconuts from palm trees. He goes fishing with Hemingway.
Played by Adrian Sparks in a style better suited for dinner theater or a Key West tourist attraction, Hemingway comes across as a complete cypher. Everyone in the film keeps talking about his genius, but other than a scene in which he writes a short story on the back of a napkin, the movie doesn’t try to humanize or explore his talent. Instead, director Bob Yari assumes everyone learned about Hemingway in high school.