The Doctor Is In | Hunter S. Thompson's glory days get celebrated in Alex Gibney's documentary Gonzo
Find It...
Directed by Alex Gibney. Narrated by Johnny Depp. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel), Sept 12, 14-17.
****
Journalism school profs often tell their hungriest students to never, ever try to write like Hunter S. Thompson. The style of participatory — or “gonzo” — reporting which Thompson massaged and marketed to world fame, they claim, is a dead end of self-indulgence. Considering Thompson’s 2005 suicide in his Woody Creek home, it’s not such a bad point. How noble or macho is it, after all, to blow your head off on the phone to your new wife, your lifelong-neglected son in the next room? Did all that attention, ultimately, do the man any good?
Though some critics have called Gonzo, Alex Gibney’s new documentary about Thompson, a puff piece, I think it takes a real fan’s insight to understand otherwise. Without having read all his books, for example, you wouldn’t know that Thompson never wrote about his family, and that the frequent interviews with his two wives seen here would utterly unnerve him. His first wife Sandy’s condemnation of his suicide is especially riveting to true believers as she calls him nothing more than a coward. It’s good reporting, though Thompson’s never-mentioned gay brother remains shrouded in mystery.
Still, we’re not looking for dirt, but insight. Like most biographies, Gibney concentrates on his subject’s heyday — the Kentucky writer’s last two decades vanish in a matter of minutes. Most of the film concentrates on the events surrounding his powerhouse trilogy: Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, and the weakest journalistic effort of the three, the eternally-praised Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Using archival interviews of the writer and genuinely fair modern reminiscing from bikers, politicians, and his family, Thompson is broken down and digested as a truly desperate man who was so haunted by F. Scott Fitzgerald that he typed out The Great Gatsby word-for-word several times on his own typewriter.
Fittingly, one of the film’s best moments is an old interview where Thompson and one of the bikers who famously “stomped” him confront each other onscreen, and, again from Sandy, we get insight into the infamous Merry Pranksters party where bikers gang-banged a young girl, a crime that disgusted Thompson.
The interviews regarding Campaign Trail, mind you, are the most intriguing — somewhat idealized tributes from everyone from Jimmy Carter to the far-right Pat Buchanan. Gary Hart, George McGovern’s campaign manager who would later run for president himself, takes Thompson apart with the most objectivity, pointing out how Thompson lost his. Conversations like these balance out Johnny Depp’s reverential, mumbling narration and Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner’s cautious-yet-idolizing takes on Dr. Gonzo. But in a way, it’s only fair and certainly fitting that everyone involved gets to play the role of participatory journalist, don’t you think?
If anything, the film is a little hard on Thompson’s later work, not even mentioning The Great Shark Hunt by name — though Tom Wolfe lets us in on what happened in the Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire, when Ali beat George Foreman to a pulp as Hunter had a meltdown, missed the fight and headed for the pool. Here, Wolfe and Thompson’s longtime illustrator Ralph Steadman agree: it was the journalist’s greatest fuckup.
And as Anita Thompson, his second wife, points out, the Bush era took its toll on our hero like it did on so many of us. Though he immediately predicted war in Iraq as the two towers went down on 9/11, being right didn’t make him happy. Magically, though, Anita secretly filmed him from the balcony one night, smiling and laughing at his own words. It’s the most touching part of the documentary.
Between Polaroids and audiotape of a naked, Nixon-masked girl Thompson cheated on Sandy with and film of him torturing his caged bird, never mind hunting with a machine gun, fans are forced to stare at a creep worse than Steadman’s most hellish portrait.
Yet a man’s work, even Hunter’s, isn’t the same as the man himself. Freak or not, his words endure, and this movie successfully captures what got them into the typewriter in the first place.
Post the first comment: (Login or Register)