"I never finished High School".
That is perhaps the most significant line in this investigation into the Hemingway Curse (to me, no less imaginary than the Kennedy Curse). We are seeing what happens when a celebrity teenager runs wild before her mind has been suitably furnished by sensible academic tuition. The hippie drivel just keeps gushing out, with random thoughts often clashing and contradicting, and hardly a complete sentence to be heard.
As the youngest daughter by seven years, Mariel is convinced that she was an unwanted arrival in the home of Ernest's alcoholic son Jack. That is an example of the self-absorbed outlook of Mariel and her sister Margaux (her name jokingly re-spelt for a premium claret). According to Mariel, both her elder sisters were sexually abused by Jack, with Margaux remaining abnormally in love with him. And the victim-points just keep mounting up and up...
Before Margaux's fatal overdose at 42, she had also started to assemble a video along the same lines, and parts of it pop-up here, rather confusingly to those of us who may initially have trouble telling the two sisters apart. "I don't think I had a childhood" says one of them against a blurry image that could have been either, the editing itself being distinctly hippie and chaotic. We also can't quite see which of them is holding one end of the matador's cape in a pathetic bullring stunt with a tiny calf.
But we can soon see that Margaux's history is the more tragic. "There was all this coke around..." she proclaims triumphantly at one point. When she comes out of the Betty Ford Clinic, announcing that she's never felt better in her life, we can see this for the hollow boast that it is.
The pilgrimage to Ernest's remote desert cabin is conducted like a disorganised student joyride, with silly reflections about wild scenery, a predictable breakdown in the middle of nowhere, and an unexplained sequence of Mariel climbing a near-vertical rockface. Only the close-ups of the gravestones carry some emotional force. Apparently visitors always leave a bottle of Jack Daniel's on Ernest's tomb, while Margaux's carries the ambiguous legend 'Free Spirit Freed'.
If the Hemingways do have a history of mental illness, Mariel seems to have defied it with the upbringing of her two daughters, who seem refreshingly sane and well-adjusted. As for her plans to discourage the stigma of suicide by working with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, we can only watch and wait.
