By Myriam Ghattas
Hunter S. Thompson was one of those larger than life personas who flickered into our consciousness just long enough to challenge widely accepted social beliefs and alter the cerebral path of future generations.
The man led a life of excess and wrote about it in autobiographical novels, articles and essays that captured the hearts and minds of the who’s who among fellow writers, journalists, artists and politicians alike but which also landed him into a lot of trouble time and again, with a notable run in with the Hell’s Angels in the 1960s.
In his friends’ own words, no one could really match the phenomenon that Hunter S. Thompson publicly shaped himself into, not even Hunter himself. If he had, he most certainly would not have survived past his 20s. Yet Thompson gave it his best shot every single day, starting with breakfast in the afternoon typically comprised of a few rounds of margaritas, a six-pack of beers, coffee, cigarettes and fruit.
Adding to this indicative diet a fair dose of drugs, violence, jubilation and breakneck open attacks on “the system,” one might just begin to form an idea of who this person was and what views he espoused. In fact, there is hardly a need for guessing as they are all over his work.
The truly compelling aspect about Hunter S. Thompson is that he did everything to the core, with a lot of heart and honesty as he pondered people’s dreams and aspirations. Albeit best known for his excesses, one needs to remember that Thompson was an ardent writer who fathered Gonzo journalism, divorcing any claims to objectivity in favor of a subjective first-person account of events while ferociously taking the bull by the horns.
A first attempt to approach a portrayal of this intrigue of a man was made on film with “Where the Buffalo Roam” (1980) starring a very dedicated Bill Murray caught up in a conservative production that was too afraid to honestly handle the subject of its narrative. It took nearly two decades before the tables were turned and another one of Thompson’s books was made into a film. Terry Gilliam’s cult “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” (1998) did everything right, starting with a conversion of two of Hollywood’s sex symbols into the balding Raoul Duke played by Johnny Depp and the overweight mess of his lawyer friend, Dr Gonzo, which Benicio del Toro owned like a pro. These two first films were portrayals of Thompson as he had come to be known: rebellious, alcoholic, adventurous, heavily drugged, quirky, suicidal and brutally honest.
Which is why “The Rum Diary” (2011) seems strangely subdued and mellow in comparison to the Hunter S. Thompson of lore. In this pseudo-autobiography based on a novel by the same title, director and writer Bruce Robinson takes a daring step backward to retract from the wild drug and alcohol-induced binge ride introduced by “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and travels back in time, to the 50s, where a young journalist, Paul Kemp, is assigned or rather self-exiled to work for a dying newspaper in Puerto Rico, a.k.a. Rum country.
Kemp is a close approximation to a young Thompson, who still had some sense at that time to scare himself out of drinking alcohol only to relapse all the more indulgently less than 24 hours later. The Thompson (or Kemp) encountered is this film is as yet still intrigued but wary of trying unknown drugs and by the man’s own standards almost manages to behave like a “normal” human being.
Kemp arrives in Puerto Rico and goes to office with a massive hangover before he sees himself assigned the hypocritical task of reporting on mundane activities and falsified success stories feeding the white man’s capitalist dreams and his greedy ego. Kemp’s attention is soon being courted by a shrewd American entrepreneur, Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart), with a shady plan. He seeks to enlist Kemp’s pen to cover up his questionable enterprise with laudatory articles.
Kemp aided by his faithful sidekick roommates, the humorous Sala (Michael Rispoli) and the ever-wasted Moberg (Giovanni Ribisi), manages to upset the local authorities on more than one occasion and attempts to rebel against the rampant corruption and exploitation he witnesses on the island resorting to the most unorthodox and unlikely solutions to do so.
Depp reprises for a the second time the portrayal of his alter-ego and in true devotion to the man’s spirit and humanity, he delivers a subtle performance that reveals a less experienced, much-toned down version of the Raoul Duke character. In “The Rum Diary,” we are not only exposed to an alternate version of Thompson, we also discover a refreshingly mature and sober Depp who is not engaged in his signature bizarre tricks.
“The Rum Diary” is a fairly unusual film, in the sense that the events depicted in it have an undeniable journal-esque quality to them. Kemp’s character experiences many emotional highs and lows and many doubts and his thoughts and reactions are what drives the course of events, rather than a staggering roller-coaster ride of explosions with twists and turns or run of the mill conspiracy theories. This character study of a young Hunter S. Thompson gains its value from its lack of pretense. In refraining from delving into an overbearing dramatization of events, the noteworthy stunts that Kemp and his acolytes do pull off during the film are all the more potent as a result.
Shot beautifully on 16mm film by cinematographer Dariusz Wolski supported with immersive art direction from Dawn Swiderski and complemented by the atmospheric Latin soundtrack of Christopher Young, “The Rum Diary” transports the viewers into a past era.
Robinson’s film is pleasurable on many different levels, not least of which are the ingenious numerous instances of blunt or delirious dialogue exchanges littering the script and delivered in a decidedly taunting matter-of-fact fashion.
For any Hunter S. Thompson fan, this latest adaptation is a must-see. A fitting insight — triggered in Kemp by none other than a lobster — adequately sums up the convoluted ideas tackled in “The Rum Diary”: Human beings are the only creatures on Earth that claim a god and the only living thing that behaves like it hasn’t got one.
Johnny Depp as Paul Kemp in The Rum Diary.
