Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith

Movies

Mariel explores troubled Hemingway clan’s ‘Running’

Mariel Hemingway looks back at the seven suicides in her family, including that of her grandfather Ernest, in the somber documentary “Running From Crazy.”

Mariel serves as a frustratingly circumspect narrator and host in the film directed by Oscar-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple (“Harlan County USA”). She mentions, but doesn’t elaborate on, her own suicidal thoughts and her father Jack’s sexual abuse of her older sisters Margaux and Muffet.

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.

After her death, Mariel discovered footage from Margaux’s own unfinished documentary, which sought to retrace Ernest’s steps but wound up being more revealing about her own descent into the abyss. Observing a bullfight in which Ernest would surely have identified with the matador, Margaux instead feels like the tortured bull.

An “Amazing Race”-style rock-climbing adventure from Mariel should’ve been discarded in favor of more reflection about Margaux.