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Does anyone care about Hunter S. Thompson anymore? The notorious journalist who had a penchant for drugs, guns and the pornographic shenanigans of the Mitchell Brothers now seems like a distant memory of high-school fascination. A rite of passage for the experimental 17-year-old who has finished The Catcher in the Rye and all of Kurt Vonnegut's novels, Thompson represents the freedom and twisted sickness one seeks when hormones scream for perversion. But at one time, Thompson meant a lot more: He explored the pitfalls of pure freedom, revealing the darkness that those in the hippie counterculture neglected to highlight when tripping out on their peace-and-love drugs. His twist was that he commented from the interior--tripping alongside the "freaks" he simultaneously celebrated and tore down. To Thompson, nihilism is horrifying and beautifully hateful. This is espoused in his classic work Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, wherein the reader is taken to the beautifully hateful "promised land" of Las Vegas--a place weirder than any psychedelic hangout on the Haight, and a city born to be filmed. Thompson's book wasn't. Director Terry Gilliam (Brazil, 12 Monkeys) takes on the Herculean task of adapting the unadaptable in his stab at Fear and Loathing. The result is successful, but this isn't necessarily a good thing. A visual whiz with a proven sense for the bizarre, Gilliam is both perfect and nefarious for this job. He is too faithful to the source material. Beginning with Thompson's first sentence of "we were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold," the picture launches into what becomes a series of drug-addled vignettes, some hilarious, many boring. Johnny Depp plays Thompson's alter-ego Raoul Duke, a sportswriter who hits the road to cover a motorcycle race. Alongside is the huge Samoan lawyer Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro), a man who pours beer on himself to "facilitate the tanning process," and who is co-conspirator to Duke's pleasure/pain. In bright flowered shirts, the two cruise from L.A. to Vegas in a cherry-red Chevy convertible loaded with nearly every drug known to man: "two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers...and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls," as it's described in the bo. They consume the drugs during their stay in Vegas, which is filmed as a series of chemically crazed adventures containing little plot narrative: Duke hallucinates a (lounge) lizard orgy where actual reptiles are sliming all over each other; Gonzo threatens journalists, including a perky Cameron Diaz, in an elevator with a knife; Duke has a flashback of his first acid trip where he dropped some on his sleeve and a hippie licked it off; Gonzo picks up an underage Jesus freak (Christina Ricci) who paints pictures of Barbra Streisand; Duke and Gonzo freak out over the presence of a narcotics agents conference taking place at their hotel, but still manage to snort coke openly while the group watches a dated dope-fiend film. All of these moments are filmed with Gilliam's typical visual assuredness, but they are not consistently clever enough to hold the viewer rapt. The film is vivid with a brilliant palette of blues, golds, reds and pukey browns, and is layered with details both subversive and stupid. Gilliam also sets up some wonderfully skewed shots, such as the duo's wrecked hotel room literally flooded with the sewage of their drug intake, food consumption and bodily waste, and a still-life image of Del Toro's bloated stomach set against a mound of round grapefruit. Unfortunately, there are too many such moments of beautiful waste and not enough exploring the gist of Thompson's work. Only the actors get close to the bone. The performances of Depp and Del Toro are brilliant examples of actors not riding the predictable, self-conscious route to cool. These men are freaks, and not very appealing ones. Depp, sporting the gold-tinted glasses, cigarette holder and bald head of Thompson, takes his usual risks in creating a character who manages to be human underneath a cartoonish exterior. Using Thompson's authoritative voice, which sounds more like that of a cop than a hippie, and the exaggerated bow-legged walk that's a cross between George Jefferson and Groucho Marx, Depp is more creative and innovative than the film itself. Del Toro is similarly impressive. As Gonzo, the usually smoldering actor is a beefed up, disgusting slob who pukes in nearly every scene. It is rare to see such a usually good-looking actor really (and I mean really) look as gross as Del Toro. In his worst moment, he lies in a bathtub filled with the filthy water of his vomit and probably shit, wearing a pair of extremely unflattering tighty-whiteys. But perhaps the actors are too good. Like truly fucked-up druggies, they are nearly indecipherable when it comes to what the hell they are talking about, and like the film, they are eventually annoying. As Thompson ended his novel, this movie is "just sick enough to be totally confident." |
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