Howl
Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (2010)
Howl goes beyond the frequent implication of movies based on real life events, that they’re by their very nature ‘true’: Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman claim at the start of the film that every word we’ll hear was actually uttered. Howl moves between the first public performance of Allen Ginsberg’s poem at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on 7 October 1955; scenes describing the main relationships in the life of Ginsberg (James Franco) in the years leading up to the poem’s appearance; excerpts from the trial for obscenity of its publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Andrew Rogers); fragments from interviews with Ginsberg c 1957 (presented as if they were a single interview); and animated images which accompany the reading. The first two of these strands are shot in black-and-white, the third and fourth in colour. The animations are so brightly coloured that they suggest psychedelic experience. Howl isn’t, however, anything like as formally original as all this might suggest: it lacks the courage of its structurally elaborate convictions. For all the technical flair that’s gone into the animations (by Eric Drooker), they are literal-minded visual aids and an expression of the film-makers’ anxiety that we’ll get bored merely watching and hearing the delivery of ‘Howl’ (In that sense, they’re not fundamentally different from the approach taken by the recent Faulks on Fiction series on BBC, which assumed no one could be interested watching people talking about novels – you had to have clips from television adaptations of them too, to prevent you from switching off.) The obscenity trial avoids the familiar melodramatics of screen courtrooms but it lacks their suspenseful qualities too. Bob Balaban plays Judge Clayton Horn impeccably – he’s especially good as he registers startled disdain when Ralph McIntosh (David Strathairn), the increasingly frustrated lawyer who’s prosecuting the obscenity charges, admits he’s got so wound up that ‘Whenever I open my mouth, anger flies out’. But one look at Balaban makes it clear, from the outset, which way the verdict will go.
Marjorie Perloff in her TLS piece is right about the lack of complexity of the dramatis personae in the courtroom: although the actors are skilled enough to disguise this, the trial transcript has been edited to present a good liberal/bad conservative dichotomy familiar from screen fictions much less sophisticated – or soi-disant sophisticated – than Howl. You get no sense of the hostility towards the poem which, Perloff says, prevailed among the fashionable American literati of the time. Like Gus Van Sant’s Milk (Van Sant has an executive producer credit here), Howl is unequivocally admiring of its protagonist and wants to celebrate his life and work. As with Milk, this makes it likeable but also (and to a much greater extent than Milk) limits its dramatic substance. Epstein (who made the 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk) and Friedman design a feelgood package with shrewd awareness, though. The film ends up being about Allen Ginsberg’s self-realisation as a gay man: the closing legends tell us that he and Peter Orlovsky lived happily together until Ginsberg’s death – and that he died ‘peacefully’. This may not be an original approach and it’s a somewhat sentimental one but at least Epstein and Friedman have Ginsberg, as part of the interview strand, justify it: he says that his homosexuality is his primary identity but that he might just as easily be a foot fetishist or someone who gets off playing the stock market. Marjorie Perloff notes that the ‘Footnote to Howl’ wasn’t part of the original reading at the Six Gallery but it makes for a climax that is so celebratory that the emotional charge of the sequence transcends its calculated placing. And Perloff isn’t right when she suggests that the film is naively reverential about the poem: the public reading of ‘Howl’ has its faults but it’s plain to see how many in-jokes there are for Ginsberg’s friends to giggle at. In the (subsequent) interviews too, Ginsberg occasionally seems amused by how seriously his work is being taken.
The poem’s power derives to a large extent from momentum. The film’s structure doesn’t allow for this – we get bits of ‘Howl’ in each of the Six Gallery sequences then are moved onto something else, often via the animations. The diluting effect of this is made worse by the shots of the audience reacting to the reading. These are pretty generic – there’s no sense of a poem reading being a particular kind of public performance. Even so, James Franco delivers the poem so well that you’re always pleased to go back to the Six Gallery for more. Franco’s skill and magnetism make it all the more frustrating that Epstein and Friedman slide away from giving us ‘Howl’ in its entirety: as a result, the ‘Footnote to Howl’, which Franco reads completely in a single sequence, is more powerful than the main poem. The directors’ penchant for fragmentation even within a single strand isn’t helpful either. There are parts of the interview sequences in which they cut to a different angle line by line: the artificiality of the technique breaks up Franco’s flow – so that his mimicry of Ginsberg occasionally comes over as artificial too. Epstein and Friedman are presumably nervous about things getting ‘static’: it’s baffling they can’t see that there’s infinitely more movement when they keep the camera on Franco and let him sustain a performing rhythm. Whenever he’s allowed to develop such rhythm, Franco is electrifying – he shows you Ginsberg’s mind working and makes the thoughts that he’s thinking and voicing seem newfound. As Ginsberg talks to the interviewer about his mother’s mental illness, Franco does something that only really good actors can do: he creates an undeniable change in the emotional temperature without our being able to see how.
Asked to justify the casting of a Hollywood pin-up as a man who was no oil painting, Epstein and Freidman have suggested that there’s not that much difference between the looks of Franco on a very bad day and Ginsberg on a very good one. That’s not particularly convincing (or even meant to be) but Ginsberg, from what I’ve seen of him in television interviews, did have considerable personal charm and Franco uses his good looks to express that charm. He really is admirable: the structure gives him very little scope to build his characterisation dramatically because he rarely has anyone to play off. Franco makes the most of his few opportunities, though, especially in the scene in which Ginsberg shares a bed with Neal Cassady for the first time. The movement from awkwardness and uncertainty into a sense of security – and, with that, a growing appetite – is beautifully done. I think Franco’s work here will stay with me longer than his performance in 127 Hours.
The cast in court are a strong bunch too although Jon Hamm, as the defence lawyer Jake Ehrlich, continues to disappoint on a bigger screen. He’s less uncomfortable than he was in The Town and flashes of the wit he shows in Mad Men come through. But only flashes: Hamm again seems imprecise and is underwhelming when he’s not Don Draper. Although the role of the prosecuting attorney McIntosh is rather crudely written (thanks to Epstein and Friedman’s selections from the transcript), David Strathairn makes McIntosh much more individual than Hamm makes Ehrlich. The witnesses, representing a range of academic, journalistic and political views, are excellent – especially Mary Louise Parker, Alessandro Nivola and Jeff Daniels. They’re expert at creating characters – each in a single scene – who nevertheless don’t get in the way of the presentation of the debate about the literary merits of ‘Howl’. In comparison, the actors playing Ginsberg’s confrères – Todd Rotondi (Kerouac), Jon Prescott (Cassady), and Aaron Tveit (Orlovsky) – don’t come through strongly. It’s only when we see them together in the audience at the Six Gallery that they even register as different people.
The problems with the film add up to the question ‘Why didn’t you just make a documentary about Ginsberg?’ The answer may be ‘So as to bring the story of him and the poem to a larger audience’ – but will the audience be that much larger, even if James Franco is a box-office draw? The elaborate structure obscuring a hole in the centre of this movie recalls Bob Fosse’s Lenny, although Howl is a less creative piece of film-making and at least Fosse’s framing device – interviews with people close to and recalling Lenny Bruce – allowed both the protagonist and the witnesses to develop as characters. Yet in spite of all these shortcomings – and the fact that they throw overboard a good deal of their precious cargo by chopping up ‘Howl’ – you can still feel Epstein’s and Friedman’s excitement about what they were doing and how they were trying to do it. Howl is a celebration of a life and of a liberating legal judgment; because the poem is a famous product of a contemporary artistic movement and the obscenity trial took place so little time after it was written, the material has much richer potential than the Lady Chatterley trial in England a short while later. (When the BBC dramatised that a couple of years ago, a parallel story of a love affair between two of the jurors was invented in order to bulk up the drama.)
Directors of biopics not infrequently decide, as they switch into the closing credits, to show a photograph or footage of the real person we’ve watched being impersonated for the previous two hours. The effect of this can be jarring – or detrimental to what the actor’s done. That isn’t the effect here – this is one respect in which the lack of dramatic texture perhaps helps. We seem to have been observing the people at (at least) one remove throughout Howl and wondered why it’s a ‘dramatic’ film at all. So when Epstein and Friedman put up pictures of the real people and words that summarise how their lives panned out beyond the 1950s, it seems to put the film into its proper context. Just before those pictures, the directors play film of Ginsberg singing ‘Father Death Blues‘. (The Wikipedia entry on Ginsberg suggests the performance is from 1985.) I had seen this before – perhaps it was shown on television when Ginsberg died in 1997 – and been very impressed by it. It’s a gripping and very right climax to Howl which, for all its faults, I greatly liked and enjoyed. It may not compare with ‘Father Death Blues’ but the score for the film, by Carter Burwell, is really nice too.
2 March 2011