"I think America is still a very confused place. What I can see now is
that its got a lot of wonderful things that I rejected before, yet
there's an inherent dumbness that floats through the whole thing."
-Terry Gilliam, Sight and Sound
Adapt, the last time I checked, means to 'make suitable for a new use or situation'. No where in the dictionary that I consulted did it say to 'clumsily and simple mindedly try to force something into a new situation.' And yet for some reason the majority of filmmakers seem to use the latter definition in screen adaptations. (The English Patient, Forrest Gump etc...) Such films fail because of a misguided approach to adaptation which usually involves simply directly translating original material into a photoplay. This ignores that implicit in the very definition of the word adaptation is a transformation a complete change to give rise to something new, not a simple translation. Often reactions to adaptations will discuss whether 'justice to the original' was served. To ask a film to do this is ridiculous. Some of my favourite adaptations have yielded something wholly other than the original and in so doing simultaneously converges with the tone or central concerns of that work. Terry Gilliam's (Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) latest film, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is to be commended for carrying out this imperative despite source material that was touted as 'unfilmable'. Although it has been repeated a thousand times elsewhere, the perfect fit between Gilliam's style and Hunter S. Thompson's 'novel' cannot be overstated. it is surely because of such a perfect match that Gilliam has been able to craft a masterwork from an original that would have stumped many another director.
The film recounts the misadventures of journalist Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) and his attorney Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro) over the course of a debilitating weekend in Las Vegas during which Duke is meant to cover a motorcycle race. The two centrepieces of the adaptation are the visual design and the tone of the film. Gilliam is known for paying careful attention to the details of his worlds; not just the look, but the very shape and texture of them. Director of Photographer Nicola Pecorini does an outstanding job of rendering a multiplicity colour to each frame. Instead of a colour scheme that implies an overriding pattern or logic, most scenes are constructed in exactly the opposite way. There are red skies, shifting filter colours and a hilarious amount of excess. The Vegas setting that occupies much of the film has never seemed more ominous despite much more realistic recent portrayals (Leaving Las Vegas). The chaotic visuals are anchored to a narrative that is exemplary in its subtle shifts in tone and point of view. This is the key element that elevates the film. Through careful manipulation of the duo's interactions Gilliam is never far from reminding the viewer of the very temporary nature of theirpleasures. (Not unlike those of the conventional cinema) Duke's repeated returns to the type writer- despite his condition making the task seemingly impossible- are an example of the tonal shifts. On the one hand it is hilarious that what comes out is so lucid and yet the whole circumstance itslef is haunting. Such shifts achieve their greatest effect in one of the final scenes of the film that occurs in a diner. The ensuing events can only be described as unsettling and serve as a clear reminder that the film's ambition lies beyond being a quizzical cult artifact.
Gilliam goes further to lend the material weight by using a very carefully constructed soundtrack. A number of aspects of the film call attention to this device from the very perticular articulations of the two main characters, to the final third of the film that finds Duke trying to reconstruct past events from a sound recording of them. The sound effects found throughout the film are rarely only the directly motivated sounds of on-screen events. The result is a soundtrack that contributes to the discomfort felt throughout the film but also denies the convenient conclusion of a single unified and coherent narrator. The voice-over is a big part of this density that Gilliam acheves through sound. Although nitially the voice-over is ostensibly a conventional first person narration, through the course of the film this gets collapsed with the 'read-over' of Duke's writing. The bridging of this gap further undermines the protoagonist as a reliable narrator and puts into question any notions of the two protagonists as heroes.
Some of the moments in the film that most terrified me are the interations between the two main characters - played impeccably by Depp and Del Toro - and the other Vegas dwellers. It is this interations that show the chasm like gap that exists between the two protagonists and the current conventions. This is very much the matter of the film as opposed to it being purly 'about drugs'. The early scene in which bar patrons take on the semblance of giant lizards signals any such interactions as important moments in the film: The subsequent scenes involving Duke trying to leave his hotel without paying or Gonzo scaring people in a neighbouring car are chilling reminders of what side of the spectrum most of us occupy.
-Omar Odeh http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/3920
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