The generally underrated Liev Schreiber anchors Paula Ortiz’s subtle and graceful adaptation of one of Ernest Hemingway’s final novels, “Across the River and Into the Trees.” Schreiber is a consistently engaging performer—I became very attuned to his approach by recapping years of episodes of “Ray Donovan”—and he shines here by virtue of what he doesn’t do, avoiding the many traps of a character who could have been a walking cliché. It helps that Schreiber’s work rests nicely in a film set in arguably the most beautiful place in the world. It’s an overused critical argument but the setting of “Across the River” truly is a character as Ortiz and her team subtly embrace the atmosphere of Venice, using mostly natural light and handheld cameras to highlight the unique energy of the Italian city, a place full of so many beginnings and endings.
Ortiz’s film is primarily about the latter. Schreiber plays an American Army Colonel named Richard Cantwell who returns to the country after World War II, in the wake of an illness that is killing him. He’s just going on a duck hunt, but he really needs some closure in a place that created significant trauma for him, hiring a driver (the slightly miscast Josh Hutcherson) to be his chauffeur, but ditching him relatively quickly for both the draw of the city and the allure of a beautiful young woman named Renata (Matilda De Angelis). The relationship between Richard and Renata is more explicitly sexual in the source, but Ortiz avoids the traps of a “final fling” drama, allowing this adaptation to be more about the needs of both characters than a traditional age gap romance.
To that end, much of “Across the River and Into the Trees” consists of walk-and-talks between Schreiber and De Angelis, as these two very different people bounce their ideas about the world and their place in it off each other. BAFTA Award-winning writer Peter Flannery strikes the right balance between the gruff nature of Hemingway’s prose and the more lyrical nature of his setting. Lines like “I have death sewn into the lining of my clothes, son,” reek of cliché but it’s the kind of Hemingway cliché that works for a film and character like this one. In a sense, Richard needs to be a relic, a stranger in a strange land that just happens to be the place that changed his life forever in the war. Again, there are so many versions of this film that fall into traps about grumpy old Americans, but Flannery, Ortiz, and Schreiber avoid almost all of them.
Ortiz does make a choice with aspect ratio that never quite clicked for me, filming most of her film in 4:3, opening it up to widescreen in flashback. The idea is likely that the world has gotten tighter and more claustrophobic with age and trauma, which is thematically effective but distracts from the gorgeous cinematography in the film by Javier Aguirresarobe, and, more critically, feels like it’s calling attention to itself a bit too often, breaking the spell of a film that, at its best, feels like eavesdropping.
While spending time in one of the most captivating cities in the world is enticing, the main reason to check this out is one of the best performances in the career of Liev Schreiber. He’s long had more range than he gets credit for, but the truth is that he’s best at playing vulnerable strong men (like Ray D.), which means he’s perfect for Hemingway. Again, I kept thinking about the vastly inferior version of this in which Richard’s redemption arc is more explicitly (and less believably) charted instead of as it is here: In the eyes, tone, and body language of a man who has seen so much beauty and so much pain, often in the same place.
