Ratings
The Daily: 2 of 5 Stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 53%
More on 'The Rum Diary'
IMDB
Official Website
It is often implied, though not often actually said, that Hunter S. Thompson was insane — and not in the sense that he did a lot of drugs and drank, though he did both of those things. This was a man who often thought inanimate objects were trying to kill him. His own son, while growing up, feared him. So did Thompson’s various wives and girlfriends. Thompson’s compound in Aspen, Colo., was dense with guns and alcohol and strange visitors. It is something of a miracle that the writer lived long enough to take his own life, and even more of a miracle that he never accidentally took anyone else’s.
Nevertheless, Johnny Depp praised him this week, at a screening of the new film adaptation of Thompson’s “The Rum Diary,” as a “perfect Southern gentleman.” Thompson’s adoring cult is more or less untouched by the volumes of oral history and biography that testify to his infidelities, his casual cruelty and his moral, professional and social unreliability. We are inured to artists behaving badly, especially when those artists manage, at some point in their life, a work as savage and unlikely as “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Who cares about Hunter Thompson when we have Raoul Duke?
It is always tempting to conflate writers with their characters, and Thompson encouraged this misperception — he even, at various points in his life, was guilty of it himself. Others have since followed suit — Depp in particular, whose eerily good impression of the real-life Hunter Thompson as a bucket hat-wearing, acid-twitching loon in Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of “Fear and Loathing” is now our default image of the writer. Depp reprises the role in Bruce Robinson’s adaptation of Thompson’s first novel, “The Rum Diary,” out today.
Both performances are true to Thompson, the real-life bald, paranoid maniac, but they don’t do many favors for Thompson’s work, which was funnier and lighter-hearted — in the case of “Fear and Loathing” — and, in the case of “Rum Diary,” more specific and immersed in the grind of daily journalism. Filmgoers liable to be impressed by both films’ lingering obsession with drinking and taking hallucinogenic drugs should consider stopping by their local frat house before hailing Depp’s Thompson as an “outlaw” or any of the other standard epithets that get applied to the writer.
“The Rum Diary” opens with a bloodshot Depp in San Juan, 1960, where he’s come to see a man about a job, and a minibar about its contents. “I tend to avoid alcohol — when I can,” he mutters to a bellhop. This is Paul Kemp, a writer with “two and a half unfinished novels and references of equal fiction,” who has come to Puerto Rico for a job on the horoscope desk of The San Juan Star. (His predecessor, we are told, was “raped to death,” in one of the many pointless allusions to Thompson’s exaggerated style that crowd the “Rum Diary” script.)
Kemp quickly encounters a girl, Chenault, played in fine Connecticut WASP style by Amber Heard; a sidekick, in the photographer Sala (Michael Rispoli); and a nemesis, in Aaron Eckhart’s Sanderson, who keeps Chenault stashed in his beachside villa and who is trying to arrange the sale of Puerto Rico’s vast and beautiful natural resources to a sinister cabal of hoteliers. In addition to Chenault, Sanderson also maintains possession of an incongruously bedazzled tortoise named Harry — “I got the idea from a book,” he says.
While Kemp gets acclimated via rum, cockfights and violent clashes with the locals, Sanderson tries to ensnare the writer in his nefarious plot, which mostly consists of having Kemp write a really good tourist brochure. In the end, Kemp sides instead with the country’s as-yet-unspoiled beaches, as he and his merry band of drunken journalists — which also includes a larynx-impaired Giovanni Ribisi, in a filthy trench coat and various antique Nazi paraphernalia — attempt an exposé, which never quite gets off the ground. Ultimately, as in the book, at the end everyone just meekly goes home.
“Rum Diary” dates from the brief optimistic period at the beginning of Thompson’s career — he wrote it when he was 22 (although he couldn’t get it published until 1998, when he and Depp rediscovered the novel in a box of Thompson’s archives). Not much happens in the book, and Robinson (the man behind the British cult classic “Withnail and I”), after reading it twice, threw it away, rewriting the story entirely. Only a couple of lines of Thompson’s made it into the final script, though Robinson’s impersonation isn’t bad. “Your tongue belongs to Satan!” Kemp says to Sala, as two men stare at each other in an acid-induced fog.
Gilliam and Depp’s “Fear and Loathing” was indelibly weird and visually masterful, but that movie omitted a lot of what made the work meaningful, which wasn’t the drugs or the violent antics but the book’s humor — it’s one of the flat-out funniest works of the 20th century — and its serrated, prescient ideas about the slow death of the American dream.
“The Rum Diary,” though unmistakably a young writer’s failed first novel, was also about the American dream — Puerto Rico (and, to some symbolic extent, the profession of journalism) as the last innocent, defiant corner of the empire — and its gradual despoliation by the forces of capital and greed. Robinson recasts it as Thompson fetish film, full of anachronistically harsh words for Nixon and Depp lurching around, reincarnating his old friend in a blaze of shouted speech and rapid head movements.
As any high school English teacher or Las Vegas hotel proprietor can tell you, Hunter Thompson’s imitators remain legion, and not one of them is particularly interesting. To revere the man is to miss the point.
The Daily: 2 of 5 Stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 53%
More on 'The Rum Diary'
IMDB
Official Website
It is often implied, though not often actually said, that Hunter S. Thompson was insane — and not in the sense that he did a lot of drugs and drank, though he did both of those things. This was a man who often thought inanimate objects were trying to kill him. His own son, while growing up, feared him. So did Thompson’s various wives and girlfriends. Thompson’s compound in Aspen, Colo., was dense with guns and alcohol and strange visitors. It is something of a miracle that the writer lived long enough to take his own life, and even more of a miracle that he never accidentally took anyone else’s.
Nevertheless, Johnny Depp praised him this week, at a screening of the new film adaptation of Thompson’s “The Rum Diary,” as a “perfect Southern gentleman.” Thompson’s adoring cult is more or less untouched by the volumes of oral history and biography that testify to his infidelities, his casual cruelty and his moral, professional and social unreliability. We are inured to artists behaving badly, especially when those artists manage, at some point in their life, a work as savage and unlikely as “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Who cares about Hunter Thompson when we have Raoul Duke?
It is always tempting to conflate writers with their characters, and Thompson encouraged this misperception — he even, at various points in his life, was guilty of it himself. Others have since followed suit — Depp in particular, whose eerily good impression of the real-life Hunter Thompson as a bucket hat-wearing, acid-twitching loon in Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of “Fear and Loathing” is now our default image of the writer. Depp reprises the role in Bruce Robinson’s adaptation of Thompson’s first novel, “The Rum Diary,” out today.
Both performances are true to Thompson, the real-life bald, paranoid maniac, but they don’t do many favors for Thompson’s work, which was funnier and lighter-hearted — in the case of “Fear and Loathing” — and, in the case of “Rum Diary,” more specific and immersed in the grind of daily journalism. Filmgoers liable to be impressed by both films’ lingering obsession with drinking and taking hallucinogenic drugs should consider stopping by their local frat house before hailing Depp’s Thompson as an “outlaw” or any of the other standard epithets that get applied to the writer.
“The Rum Diary” opens with a bloodshot Depp in San Juan, 1960, where he’s come to see a man about a job, and a minibar about its contents. “I tend to avoid alcohol — when I can,” he mutters to a bellhop. This is Paul Kemp, a writer with “two and a half unfinished novels and references of equal fiction,” who has come to Puerto Rico for a job on the horoscope desk of The San Juan Star. (His predecessor, we are told, was “raped to death,” in one of the many pointless allusions to Thompson’s exaggerated style that crowd the “Rum Diary” script.)
Kemp quickly encounters a girl, Chenault, played in fine Connecticut WASP style by Amber Heard; a sidekick, in the photographer Sala (Michael Rispoli); and a nemesis, in Aaron Eckhart’s Sanderson, who keeps Chenault stashed in his beachside villa and who is trying to arrange the sale of Puerto Rico’s vast and beautiful natural resources to a sinister cabal of hoteliers. In addition to Chenault, Sanderson also maintains possession of an incongruously bedazzled tortoise named Harry — “I got the idea from a book,” he says.
While Kemp gets acclimated via rum, cockfights and violent clashes with the locals, Sanderson tries to ensnare the writer in his nefarious plot, which mostly consists of having Kemp write a really good tourist brochure. In the end, Kemp sides instead with the country’s as-yet-unspoiled beaches, as he and his merry band of drunken journalists — which also includes a larynx-impaired Giovanni Ribisi, in a filthy trench coat and various antique Nazi paraphernalia — attempt an exposé, which never quite gets off the ground. Ultimately, as in the book, at the end everyone just meekly goes home.
“Rum Diary” dates from the brief optimistic period at the beginning of Thompson’s career — he wrote it when he was 22 (although he couldn’t get it published until 1998, when he and Depp rediscovered the novel in a box of Thompson’s archives). Not much happens in the book, and Robinson (the man behind the British cult classic “Withnail and I”), after reading it twice, threw it away, rewriting the story entirely. Only a couple of lines of Thompson’s made it into the final script, though Robinson’s impersonation isn’t bad. “Your tongue belongs to Satan!” Kemp says to Sala, as two men stare at each other in an acid-induced fog.
Gilliam and Depp’s “Fear and Loathing” was indelibly weird and visually masterful, but that movie omitted a lot of what made the work meaningful, which wasn’t the drugs or the violent antics but the book’s humor — it’s one of the flat-out funniest works of the 20th century — and its serrated, prescient ideas about the slow death of the American dream.
“The Rum Diary,” though unmistakably a young writer’s failed first novel, was also about the American dream — Puerto Rico (and, to some symbolic extent, the profession of journalism) as the last innocent, defiant corner of the empire — and its gradual despoliation by the forces of capital and greed. Robinson recasts it as Thompson fetish film, full of anachronistically harsh words for Nixon and Depp lurching around, reincarnating his old friend in a blaze of shouted speech and rapid head movements.
As any high school English teacher or Las Vegas hotel proprietor can tell you, Hunter Thompson’s imitators remain legion, and not one of them is particularly interesting. To revere the man is to miss the point.
