Film review by Kevin Patterson
FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS Rating: ***1/2 (out of four) R, 1998 Directed by Terry Gilliam. Written by Gilliam, Tony Grisoni, Tod Davies, and Alex Cox. Starring Johnny Depp, Benicio Del Toro.
The promotion for FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS has made the film out to be a comedy, and for about the first hour or so it seems like it might be one. It's 1971, and the hippie movement has left behind quite a few wash-outs, among them journalist Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) and his "attorney" Dr. Gonzo (Benito Del Toro). These two spend most of the film in a drug-induced stupor, having strange hallucinations, trashing their hotel rooms, and either annoying or scaring almost everyone that crosses their path. Duke is first assigned to cover an outdoor desert motorcycle race in Las Vegas, but gets lost in a blur of drugs, beer, and flying dust, and ends up wandering around with no clue who won. He leaves Vegas briefly before he is sent back, in what can only be described as a strangely appropriate twist of fate, to cover a drug enforcement conference.
FEAR AND LOATHING has been misinterpreted by some as glorifying the use of drugs. It doesn't, even in the beginning--while the pair's antics are sometimes amusing and relatively harmless at first, the humor here is still fairly dark. Director Terry Gilliam views them with a rather satirical eye, and even when we're laughing, we're laughing at them rather than with them. They spend most of their time paranoid, angry, or just plain befuddled, which is probably an understandable reaction to seeing the entire room suddenly fill up with giant reptiles. The black comedy may be entertaining to watch onscreen, but it's probably not something most other audience members would want to experience first-hand.
All this aside, I was starting to grow a bit restless as the film drew near its one-hour mark, thinking to myself that I wanted something more out of this than just an off-kilter satire of drug culture. Thankfully, the script delivers it before too long, as Duke, in a rare moment of lucidity, stops to recall how he was once an enthusiastic hippie, "riding the wave" of something that seemed special and important. Now it's six years later and the wave has finally broken, as he puts it. Materialistic culture is still alive and well and, for most of this film, right in his face in Las Vegas; the "American Dream" of which Duke occasionally speaks is still just as shallow and phony as ever. The social protesters have lost, and the more questionable aspects of the movement have turned ugly and left casualties such as Duke to drift in a sea of drugs and disillusionment.
In many ways, FEAR AND LOATHING is Gilliam's most reality-based film; all of his others, with the exception of THE FISHER KING, have made use of some sort of fantasy or science-fiction plot elements. Yet it is his off-the-wall masterpiece BRAZIL to which this film bears the most visual resemblance. The protagonist of BRAZIL found himself alternately surrounded by a plastic, soulless society and the constant chaos of totalitarian police inspections and terrorist attacks, and similarly Duke's world is composed of the artificial, empty glam of Las Vegas and the bizarre anarchy of his drug hallucinations. Unlike the protagonist of BRAZIL, however, Duke is not a particularly admirable figure, and neither is Gonzo. During the latter half of the film, their trips turn nastier and the consequences worse, eventually building up to an incident an a diner in which Gonzo crudely frightens and humiliates a waitress, while Duke, though he doesn't seem to approve, doesn't do anything to stop it either. By the time this scene takes place, they don't seem like hippies or peaceniks or protesters or anything of the sort any more; they just seem like a couple of stoned jerks in a diner. Duke seems to realize at some level that he's become something he doesn't like, but he's either too apathetic or too defeated to do anything to change.
This film has taken a critical drubbing from many who view it as an essentially pointless film that simply throws one trip scene after another at the audience. While Gilliam may have overdone it in a few places, I think he and his co-writers deserve more credit than that. There's plenty of substance here, particularly in the second half; its observations about the broken and defeated rebels from the '60s and the objects of their rebellion just aren't usually very pleasant. Unlike, say, BRAZIL or THE FISHER KING, both of which feature a character who dares to let himself dream in a repressive environment, FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS shows us someone who's given up on his dreams and resorts to the quick fix of drugs. In its own psychedelic, whacked-out way, it's sad and regretful, but I think it's also a bit of a kick in the pants, a challenge to find an alternative between chemically-induced withdrawal and the equally addictive drug of Vegas-style materialism. Indeed, Duke himself admits at one point that he's never learned to accept that you can get higher without drugs than with them. I'm not sure if he's any closer to accepting it by the end or not, but I suspect the audience will get the idea.
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