A Weak Tale of a Weird Time.
I have just finished watching Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, now playing at the Hollywood Theater. I am sorely disappointed in this movie, both as a documentary film and as a representation of a great American life. What could have been a real dissection of a complicated, culturally important man and a mind-grabbing analysis of our world through his writings was instead a soft, commercially-viable love letter to his petty-psychonaut mass-market fan base. It is merchandise bearing the Gonzo brand, produced by people who knew enough to have given us more. The narrative flow of Gonzo is an attention-deficit-pandering plummet down a list of bullet points, skipping a stone across the surface of Thompson’s 67 years instead of diving the hell into it and plunging hands into the silt to bring whatever lives in the ooze up to the light.
The last thirty years of Thompson’s life are treated in the final fifteen minutes of the film, the rest plays as though hung on a high school student’s rough outline of The Great Shark Hunt. His association with Oscar Acosta is mentioned briefly in the context of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, with no mention whatsoever of Ruben Salazar. His burnout before the Ali-Foreman fight in 1974 is presented as a standalone turning point after which he wrote little of value, where the filmmakers could instead have examined Thompson’s bizarre tendency to duck out of occasions that would have made amazing journalism, such as the Watergate hearings. Thompson is painted again and again as a man torn in two directions, a passionate writer overshadowed by the rock-star-of-letters personna he invented, but the film itself perpetuates this myth by dwelling on his drug use, antics, partying, and personal angst (the useless hipster trash I shared an auditorium with ate up every zinger about how high Hunter was on a daily basis). If you already know anything about Thompson’s personal life, you’ve heard nearly everything this movie has to say; each statement the film makes is like the coy lead-in sentence of an informative paragraph that never follows.
This film is worth sitting through for the interview segments with HST’s first wife, Sondi Wright, and their son, Juan, for its collection in one edited block of many personal and historical film clips that would otherwise require much searching and sifting on YouTube, and as a lesson in what any greed-headed jackal would do to any of our corpses if it thought our dead eyes looked pretty in the moonlight. If Gonzo left you as cold as it left me, try these films by Wayne Ewing that cover HST’s legal battles, creative conflicts, and personal crusade to overturn Lisl Auman’s wrongful murder conviction. Biographies of Thompson are thick on the ground these days, but my favorite by far is Fear and Loathing: The Strange and Terrible Saga of Hunter S. Thompson by Thompson’s editor at Running magazine.