Critic Reviews

Using home movies and other footage, Kopple provides a discomfiting portrait of a family’s deep-seated dysfunction.

It’s Margaux, the tragic supermodel and failed actress who took her own life at 42, who emerges as the film’s fount of heartbreak in several stunning scenes.

It's good nonetheless, an artfully arranged account of Hemingway's current life, mixed with footage shot by her late sister Margaux for a 1983 documentary about the family.

There is much here of interest to aficionados of the great author as well as to those curious about the complicated relationship between sisters Mariel and the late Margaux.

This heart-wrenching and deceptively conventional documentary manages the tensions in its subject and in the vérité approach in a fruitful, illuminating and surprisingly moving way.

Hemingway wins us over and, in the end, comes off as earnest in her desire to use her celebrity to help shine a light on the maladies that have shattered her family, time and again.

The only new titbit of information for Hemingway-philes is that none of his grandchildren read his books.

A certain Hollywood self-absorption is on display here, but the family’s depressing story merits Mariel’s vigilant defensiveness.

At once short on details and incredibly forthcoming, Barbara Kopple's documentary doesn't dig into specifics about Mariel's personal struggles with mental illness nor the WillingWay lifestyle that she and her boyfriend Bobby Williams espouse.

That the structure consistently undermines its own storytelling is frustrating when the story to be told is a vital and interesting one.