Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) 118m.
There are always a few posers to consider when reviewing a long-in-coming film adaptation of a well-known book. Should the film be judged without reference to its source material? Should you read the book first and then view the film as its visual interpretation? What about reading the book afterwards? Should you read it at all? Shouldn't a film be its own peculiar entity, irrespective of its ancestry?
I didn't have a problem with Terry Gilliam's film of Hunter S. Thompson's book, but I imagine several others will. To begin with, it's one of those books that are tagged 'unfilmable'. I was in the fortunate position of having read 'Fear and Loathing' several years ago in high school, so by the time of the film version I had forgotten nearly everything that had happened in the book (so, I suspect, had Thompson). But I did remember the overall 'nothingness' of the story, which was enough to prepare me for the movie. The one-sentence plot can be summarized thus: Two men go to Las Vegas with a suitcase full of drugs and spend the whole trip off their heads. It's pointless, plotless, and indulgent. It was also the birth of what became known as 'gonzo journalism', a sort of stream-of-consciousness reportage where the journo drops all pretense of trying to say anything important and becomes his own story.
If Hunter's book is gonzo journalism then Gilliam's film is gonzo cinema. It's gleefully self-destructive. It is Gilliam fastening his lance to a Chevrolet convertible and charging at the windmills with his foot to the floor. But where he really nails down the film with one solid thwack is the way that everyone involved with the project doesn't seem to care about the risk they are taking. Nothing about it is subtle. The acting and directing are uninhibited to the point of being sophomoric. And nobody is going to apologize. If FEAR AND LOATHING is trying to simulate Thompson's similarly reckless state of mind (as it was in 1971) then it has to succeed on that score at least. It recreates the sensation that many of its prospective audience will undoubtedly relate to - that when you're stoned anything and everything can be funny. The opening five minutes is hysterical, but it's another thing to keep repeating those five minutes ad nauseum to the same effect. Gilliam tries to make it as attractive as possible nevertheless, at least to cinema-goers, and those most interested in FEAR AND LOATHING will be the ones going to see its heightened pop colors, drunken angles, and crystal-clear depth of field on the big screen. Those who are less interested will grab it off the video shelf and sit through forty minutes before hitting the fast-forward button. This film isn't made for video. It is not meant to be controlled by the viewer. It's a film that controls the viewer. It wants to be the rush, and you the user. It's what I like most about Gilliam's project; there's an admirable folly in making a big-budget film supposedly for mainstream audiences and then telling them that they're going to have to learn to watch films differently if we ever want to get out of the Hollywood rut. David Cronenberg has been pushing this element into commercial cinema for years now. When he or Gilliam get around to making something out of a Thomas Pynchon novel, I know we'll have arrived.
And in the middle of this paranoid, hallucinogenic buzz sits Johnny Depp, adding to his collection of oddball characters, who is left to provide some sort of anchor to all the disorganization around him. Except Depp is just as flaky as everything else in the film, so even that idea gets torpedoed. If you hate Depp's bewildered performance - like Groucho Marx after shock treatment - then you'll be one of the people that walks out early, something I'm confident happens in nearly every screening this film has. Maybe they didn't read the book. Or maybe they did. Or maybe they just wanted to perpetuate the concept of gonzo-filmgoing by buying tickets for a movie they didn't want to watch.
http://smart.sbay.com/ofcs/profiles/sburridge.html
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews