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The Washington Post review:
Barbara Kopple’s engrossing documentary “Running From Crazy,”
co-produced by Oprah Winfrey and airing Sunday night on OWN, is
ostensibly a film about occurrences of mental illness and suicide within
the same family.
But because the family is that of Ernest Hemingway’s descendents,
“Running From Crazy” can’t help but be drawn to the ways life is lived
in the darkest shadows of celebrity, even in the middle of what appears
to be a glorious, sun-drenched Idaho summer circa 2011.
The
burdens of fame are as important to this film as the burdens of shame —
the shame associated with mental illness, suicide, alcoholism, unhappy
marriages and memories of sexual abuse, as viewed through the thoughts
and recollections of Mariel Hemingway, the ingenue actress who was only
16 when Woody Allen cast her as his girlfriend in “Manhattan.”
Now 52, Hemingway has, like so many other women of her age and
means, found some solace on the yoga mat. Amicably divorced from her
husband of 23 years (with whom she raised two daughters), Hemingway
spends much of her time seeking balance and remaining alert to any signs
of psychological collapse in herself and those she loves. With her
boyfriend Bobby Williams, a stuntman and fitness fanatic, she runs a
lifestyle/nutrition venture called the WillingWay,
and not very far into “Running From Crazy” you begin to fear that
you’ve run smack into an infomercial for the actress’s specially
concocted macro-nutrient “blisscuit” bars.
But Kopple, an Academy Award-winning filmmaker whose documentaries include “Harlan County USA,” “American Dream” and “Wild Man Blues,”
isn’t here for a dose of the woo-woo. Patiently and often elliptically,
Kopple’s camera watches as Hemingway scours deep for memories of her
parents’ and older sisters’ emotional and mental troubles.
Hemingway
gets that her present-day life, to an outsider or even to the viewers
of “Running From Crazy” will look somewhat less than afflicted. “I know
what [people] think of me. Tall, blond — what does she have to say to
me? I would think the same thing,” she says. “Guess what? A bunch of
funky s--- happened in my family. I’m scared, too.”
She’s not
doing this only for sport or self-promotion; in recent years, Hemingway
has spent a fair amount of her time speaking out about mental illness
and suicide issues and lending her name to related causes. It’s her
thing. On just about every level, “Running From Crazy” is about the ways
all celebrities have a thing, whether they want that thing or not.
Hemingway can name several relatives, including her grandfather and
sister, who committed suicide.
Born four months after
Ernest (“Papa”) Hemingway shot himself in 1961, Mariel grew up with two
older sisters, Joan (who was called “Muffet”) and Margot.
The girls’ father, Jack, was Ernest’s oldest son — an outdoorsman and writer who helped finish his father’s memoir, “A Moveable Feast,”
for a posthumous publication, but largely shunned publishing ambitions
for the fishing stream and the quiet of Ketchum, Idaho, rarely speaking
of Papa.
Mariel’s chief memory of her father and mother, Byra
(who went by the nickname “Puck”), is that of a seethingly and verbally
abusive marriage, brought about each evening by “wine time,” when her
parents would uncork the booze.
When Mariel was still young, the
adventuresome yet manic Muffet ran off to travel the world and party,
eventually returning in a deflated mental state that left her dependent
on their parents.
The middle sister, Margot, as anyone who was
pop-culture literate in the 1970s will recall, left Idaho for New York,
changed the spelling of her name to Margaux, and became a supermodel of
the Studio 54 era, thanks in no small part to her famous surname and a
plucky, girlish allure that seemed to presage ’80s preppy-punk fashion.
(Time magazine put Margaux on its cover in 1975 under the headline “The
New Beauties.”)
In a peculiar twist of fate that she soon
regretted, Margaux invited her kid sister Mariel to take a supporting
role in her 1976 film “Lipstick,”
a grisly rape/revenge drama starring Margaux as a fashion model.
Critics panned Margaux’s performance while praising Mariel’s. As
Margaux’s career meandered, Mariel got the Woody Allen movie and an
Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress, which led to more
roles. The sisters never got over the envy and ill will it caused.
Whittled
down somewhat, “Running From Crazy” might have been an even better film
solely about the fraught subject of siblings. Kopple’s work here is
indebted to reels of footage from a documentary Margaux attempted to
make in the mid-1980s about her family and her grandfather’s literary
fame. (Pieced together, that film was eventually released in 1998.)
Margaux made a show of jetting home to Ketchum with a camera crew,
fixed on the concept of rediscovering Papa’s legacy. She also filmed a
pilgrimage to Spain to watch her grandfather’s beloved bullfights; one
gets the sense that the film was just a desperate bid to cash in once
more.
But Margaux also captured moments that have an awkward,
uncomfortable air of familial hurt and personal desperation. These form
essential (and frankly fascinating) evidence for Kopple’s film about
Mariel’s attempt to let in some light several decades later. It all
makes for a harrowing glimpse within a family that is unable to address
its demons. Margaux continued to struggle and died of a drug overdose in
1996, when she was 42. It was years before the family accepted that
death as a suicide, exercising the same denial that followed Papa’s
“shooting accident.”
Mariel is both alert and oblivious to the
recurring themes from one generation to the next. “Running From Crazy”
opens with Mariel and her daughter, Langley, posing for a lavishly
styled cover shoot for Town & Country magazine. Her other daughter,
Dree, in a curious replay of the family’s other affliction,
celebrityhood, went off to New York to become a model and actress,
opting to use her great-grandfather’s famous surname. Hemingway seems
convinced that her daughters won’t be haunted by the family’s so-called
curse, while the daughters appear only nominally interested in the past
she’s trying to share with them.
What “Running From Crazy”
ultimately discovers is a beautiful, middle-aged woman — Mariel — who
talks frequently about personal courage and yet is still understandably
intimidated by the contradictory elephants in so many rooms. A visit to
Papa’s enshrined Ketchum home includes a tentative walk to the rear
hallway where he shot himself, a space his granddaughter always equated
with haunted basements and other dangerous places. “It’s like something
kept me away,” she says.
Hemingway’s mother died in 1988; her
father died in 2000; Margaux’s death occurred in between — all of it
freeing Hemingway to dig as deeply as she needs to. She is convinced,
from incidents she witnessed as a little girl, that her father sexually
abused both Muffet and Margaux when he was drunk and that her mother
protected her from the same abuse by insisting that little Mariel sleep
with her most nights, away from Jack.
Hemingway also tries to talk
through her feelings about Margaux. In “Running From Crazy’s” most raw
moment, Mariel reveals that she thought Margaux was stupid. “I couldn’t
see her as beautiful,” she recalls with real regret.
Late in the
film comes the almost surprising news that Mariel’s older sister Muffet —
who seems to always be referred to in the past-tense — is, in fact,
alive, managing her illness and making abstract paintings of Papa and
Jack, while residing in a group home close enough for Hemingway to
visit.
But Mariel admits that she rarely goes to see Muffet. “It
makes me so uncomfortable,” she says. “I always say I’m going to come by
and I don’t.” When she goes this time, proffering kombucha tea and
coconut water, it’s a friendly afternoon of small talk, seemingly to
benefit the documentary.
“Running From Crazy,” with its Oprah
imprimatur, wants very much to be a story of a woman who has triumphed.
Hemingway may deservedly feel that she’s reached a mountaintop of
healing and inner truths and all that; but, as the film subtly reveals,
she is still often staring at the summit from a valley far below.
Running From Crazy (two hours) airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on OWN.
