Monthly Archives: June 2016

  • The Rum Diary

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bruce Robinson (2011)

    Hunter S Thompson’s novel was written in 1961 but not published until 1998, the year that saw the release of the screen adaptation of his best-known work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which starred Johnny Depp.  In the years that followed, turning The Rum Diary into a film proved to be a stop-go-stop process.  Depp, involved in the first abortive project to bring the book to the screen, was a good friend of the author.  By the time things got moving again in 2007, with Depp again a prime mover, Thompson had committed suicide.   In 1960, he had travelled from New York to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to write for a doomed local newspaper; so too does Paul Kemp, the journalist protagonist of The Rum Diary.  Thompson was notorious for his consumption of narcotics and alcohol; Kemp is often high or hallucinating from booze or drugs.  Bruce Robinson, who did the screenplay as well as directing, has had his own alcohol problems – a Google search brings up articles about his resuming hard drinking during the making of The Rum Diary.  Without knowing any or all of this, you’re liable to find Robinson’s movie baffling.  In spite of the sunny, seaside Puerto Rican setting of the story, nearly all the scenes look underlit (the cinematographer was Dariusz Wolski), which increases the prevailing opacity.  The back-story doesn’t turn The Rum Diary into a good film but some understanding of the off-screen context allows you to make at least some sense of what’s before your eyes.

    The film is dedicated to the memory of Hunter S Thompson, probably in more ways than one.  A legend at the end announces the fact.  It may be reverence and affection that make Johnny Depp’s portrait of Thompson’s alter ego tight and inexpressive.  He speaks in a voice that’s toneless and seems not to belong to him.  His pantomimes of whacked astonishment seem just that – pantomimes, although without the vitality that usually implies.  The performance is so remote that it’s almost intriguing – it’s as if the character Depp is playing is pretending to be an actor playing a drunk.  Depp has put on weight for the role but the attempts to make his body look unhealthy aren’t convincing.  Watching him reminds you that a regimen of drink and drugs can create a physique with a distinctive, morbid hardness but Depp’s Kemp, waking red-eyed in his room and walking stiffly round it in his boxers, is faux-unhealthy.  The extra pounds on his body have no characterising benefit.  The extra weight on his face seems only to obstruct expressiveness.

    If the screen version of The Rum Diary has been long awaited by fans of Hunter S Thompson, the wait is as nothing compared with the one suffered by those who are devotees of Bruce Robinson because of Withnail and I.  This is only the third feature that Robinson has directed since his famous debut in 1986 and his first since 1992.   I’ve not read the book (or anything by Thompson) so I can’t say what’s gone wrong in the adaptation but something has.  It’s possible Robinson thought too long about how he wanted to make the film.  If so, the unfortunate effect is that he doesn’t look to have thought about it at all.  Except for Christopher Young’s agreeable score, The Rum Diary has no style.  (There are pleasant contemporary songs on the soundtrack too, although, in one sequence, the pulsing music heard in a club sounds much later than 1960, when the story is set.)  I don’t know if the structure of the novel is diaristic:  the film’s narrative is episodic but lacks highlights or shading of any kind – it’s one thing after another, without any deepening of the themes or even a sense of accumulating threat or craziness.

    The characters and situations have, respectively, cartoonish and nightmarish potential that isn’t realised.  There are lots of clever, witty lines and plenty of talented people delivering them (Aaron Eckhart, Richard Jenkins, Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Rispoli; Amber Heard is appealing as Eckhart’s fiancée, with whom Depp falls in love).  The actors give out hints of anxiety – as if they know the roles they’re playing are rather thin and are uneasy about inhabiting them realistically.  The acting could have been more successful if it had been cruder:  a more full-blooded, caricatural style might have released more energy in the cast.  Even so, these supporting performances are accomplished and the inertness of the film becomes mystifying.  It was this sense of puzzlement that stopped me walking out.  Paul Kemp aka Hunter S Thompson sees his writing as the means of exposing, and getting his own back on, the world’s ‘bastards’.  He may use a typewriter but he talks about ink as if it were blood.  Yet this tribute to Thompson is anaemic.

    17 November 2011

  • The Roaring Twenties

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Raoul Walsh (1939)

     This isn’t a long picture by modern standards but, at 104 minutes, it feels long – and seems turgid and schematic, at least in comparison with The Public Enemy.  Whereas that film has opening and closing legends that confirm its moral credentials, The Roaring Twenties has a voiceover (John Deering), which we hear at several points, performing the same service.  It starts with a flashback montage – from 1940 (the film opened in theatres a few weeks after the outbreak of the World War II in Europe) to 1918, with images of the big names in international politics during the twenty-two years in question.   The Public Enemy’s mission statement describes the gangster world as an evil which must be eradicated.  The Roaring Twenties majors on the political and social forces of the time and on how they shape human destinies.  The real action begins with three American soldiers in the trenches in November 1918, minutes (seconds!) before the armistice is declared.

    The soldiers are Eddie Bartlett (James Cagney), George Hally (Humphrey Bogart) and Lloyd Hart (Jeffrey Lynn).  The characterisation of at least one, and perhaps two, of the trio in this opening sequence contradicts the narration’s idea that their lives will be determined by something other than individual personality and motivation.   Lloyd, preparing to shoot a German soldier, puts down his gun.  When George asks why, Lloyd says, ‘He was a kid – only looked about fifteen’.  George takes aim and fires.  ‘He won’t see sixteen’, he announces with laconic satisfaction.  I say ‘at least one, and perhaps two’ because Jeffrey Lynn’s Lloyd is so colourless that blowing with the wind seems an essential part of his nature:  this makes it hard to tell whether this young lawyer is dominated by events or whether he’s a shrewd chameleon.  But nothing that Bogart’s cold-hearted George, a former saloon-keeper, does throughout the changing times that the story spans comes as any surprise.  (Although the title is decade-specific, the timescale of the action extends beyond the end of prohibition in 1933.)   The demonstration of how people fall prey to the corruptions of the particular time and place in which they live therefore has to focus on Cagney’s Eddie.  Before he went to fight in Europe, he was a New York cab-driver.  When he returns in 1919, someone else has got his job.   Eddie is determined to make the best of himself and builds up a fleet of cabs through delivering bootleg liquor.  He hires Lloyd as his lawyer and George subsequently becomes Eddie’s business partner, before they fall out.   After the Wall Street crash, Eddie falls on hard times.  George doesn’t.

    While he was soldiering in France , a young American girl became Eddie’s pen pal.  He visits the girl, Jean Sherman, on his return home and she becomes the love of his life; it’s meant to be one of Eddie’s tragedies that this love is never reciprocated.  You can certainly believe that Priscilla Lane , who plays Jean, wouldn’t go for a bloke like Cagney’s Eddie, socially beneath her but emotionally beyond her.  The mystery is why Eddie would be attracted to Jean, who has a weirdly spinsterly quality in her early scenes and then turns into a particular type of screen heroine which lasted through the thirties and forties and even beyond:  tiresomely ladylike in a smiley-virtuous, condescending way.   (I think of Teresa Wright as a prime exponent of this style.)  Priscilla Lane was the actress’s real name but its suggestion of prissy is almost improbably apt (one thing you can believe about the story is that Jean would end up marrying Lloyd).  For a while, I wondered if Eddie’s love for Jean increased as his way of life moved further away from that of the ‘ideal soldier’ to whom she had written in 1918 but I don’t expect this was the idea.  The Lane sisters were a popular singing trio of the 1920s and 1930s and it appears that Priscilla was the most individually successful of the three.  Jean wants to be a musical star and Priscilla Lane gets the opportunity to sings ‘My Melancholy Baby’ and ‘I’m Just Wild About Harry’.  She’s melodious but impersonal – again, I found it hard to tell whether that was how we were supposed to find Jean.

    The only relationship in The Roaring Twenties that amounts to much is the one between Eddie and Panama Smith, the speakeasy hostess who holds a torch for him as long as he holds one for Jean.  Although the role is hackneyed, Gladys George is excellent as Panama – her shopworn glamour and fragile resilience are very appealing, and there’s a chemistry between her and Cagney.   There’s also a connection between Cagney and Frank McHugh, who plays his old cab driver pal.  Cagney is very compelling (although less convincing here as a ringleader than as a sole agent).  Among the well-known names that appear on the credits is that of Robert Rossen, who shares the screenplay credit with Jerry Wald and Mark Hellinger (who wrote the source material).

    11 July 2009

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