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