To get to the heart of the mess that is The Rum Diary, Johnny Depp's deeply personal cinematographic tribute to his late friend Hunter S. Thompson, one needs to backtrack to the mess that was The Rum Diary, the novel Thompson began working on as a novice writer in 1960, which would not be published until 1998.
The story goes something like this: In 1960, Thompson — an arrogant, violent 22-year-old from Louisville, Ky., who was convinced he was the next Hemingway — became impatient at not being instantly recognized as a literary genius in New York. He hatched a plan: He would move to Puerto Rico, get a day job as a journalist and immediately start working on a career-making novel about his experiences there, his tropical version of The Sun Also Rises.
His stay was brief, a few chaotic months, characterized not only by Thompson's volatility but also by his complete disconnection to actual Puerto Rican life, its language or anything beyond his solipsistic fantasies. Those fantasies were a blend of Hemingway's idealistic machismo, Fitzgerald's Gatsby at his most mawkish and self-pitying, the romantic allure of the Beats, and healthy cribbing from Men's Adventure–type pulp magazines — particularly with regard to women.
Thompson left Puerto Rico for further South American adventures inspired by even sketchier dreams. By 1963, Thompson had returned to the States, where he continued to behave like the very model of the "Ugly Americans" he had spent his years abroad railing in print against.
All this foreign travel, motivated as it was, essentially, by egotism, was not very conducive to understanding anything outside of Thompson's own psyche, so it's no surprise that his literary output during those years was not very good. "He'd been referring to The Rum Diary as 'the Great Puerto Rican Novel,' " writes Thompson biographer William McKeen in 2008's excellent, balanced Outlaw Journalist. Thompson apparently was convinced that he was treading "into semivirgin terrain, since the only Western writer mining Latin America was Catholic-obsessed Graham Greene."
Thompson was both completely ignorant of, and uninterested in, the massive boom in Latin American literature exploding all around him while he drunkenly chased Hemingway's shadow.
By 1962, Thompson had completed a 1,000-page manuscript called The Rum Diary, which he unsuccessfully peddled to editors, and he continued to revise it to make it more controversial and sellable. In 1964, as incendiary civil rights debates became a daily feature of politics and the news, Thompson callously bragged about adding an extreme "interracial sex scene" that would shock readers. The scene in question features the nubile femme fatale Chenault, a cock-teasing tanned vision in a white bikini, gangbanged by several black men while the white antiheroes are carried away helplessly.
But no amount of added shock value could disguise the fact that Thompson's novel was a clunker, and he knew it. "Like most young writers, I am a natural ingrate," he wrote to a friend in 1962, "and will always think that my work and my views are above and beyond advice — at least until I finish one thing and can get far enough away from it to see it clear and mean like a girl who drives you mad when you're drunk and then looks like hell in the morning."
As we know, when Hunter S. Thompson finally stopped running away from the United States and his troubling Southern roots, he found his voice as a nonfiction innovator and vernacular prose stylist, first with a very good (and commercially successful) book about the Hells Angels, and then with a string of on-the-money magazine articles culminating with his signature tour de force, which he later annoyingly dismissed as "the Vegas book." He found his niche chronicling "the Death of the American Dream," that is, the angst of the white middle class in the anticlimactic '70s — preferably from a hotel room, out of his mind on someone else's expense account.
Thus The Rum Diary lay dormant until 1998, when Johnny Depp found the manuscript while doing research for Terry Gilliam's carnivalesque Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas adaptation, in which he starred. Depp thought of the unpublished novel as eminently cinematic and an excellent potential source of income for the constantly cash-strapped countercultural icon.
"The Rum Diary came out when it did because [Thompson] needed money, absolutely," confirms his longtime agent Lynn Nesbit in Gonzo, the official oral history prepared by Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner as a mythmaking tribute. "He never would've published that 20 years before."
Six hundred pages were discarded from the manuscript and the resulting short book earned lukewarm praise from critics as a welcome appetizer for Thompson's later work. The current paperback has a blurb by Jimmy Buffett.
And now, six years after Thompson's suicide and after a protracted production schedule that had to be squeezed around humongous blockbuster obligations, Johnny Depp's pet Gonzo project has finally been unveiled. Thanks to the inane Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Depp can do pretty much whatever he wants in Hollywood, and what he wanted in this case was to hire the director of Withnail and I out of directorial semiretirement and make him reinterpret the "spirit" (though not the precise plot) of The Rum Diary as "Hunter would have wanted it."
Excellent piece of writing by Gustavo Turner. But even so, and not knowing all that in advance, I enjoyed the movie far more than he did. The ending fizzled, but the rest is more fun and far more invigorating than a lot of what's out there. Bravo to Bruce Robinson and Johnny D.
I enjoyed this film but, unfortunately, squeezing 1,000 pages into a two-hour movie means a lot of scenes have to be abbreviated or eliminated.
I would like to have seen Amber Heard's Chenault character included more and developed further. Especially helpful would have been including a few graphic minutes of Chenault's interracial gangbang/orgy, as it would have made her scrubbed, repentant and apologetic look (when she knocks on Kemp/Depp's door) more understandable.
Overall, though, the film had a convincing 1960's "look and feel," and it was a fitting tribute to Hunter S. Thompson, to whom the film is dedicated.
While Hunter S. Thompson may have been a narcissist, he was able to change the gray look of journalism and freed up journalists to color their stories with their own observations and vignettes. For a young reporter in the 70s, it was Thompson who bit through the chains that bound us to the regimented writing of newspapers. Those of us who knew Thompson are in his debt.
I’m very anxious to see Depp embody the good doctor again! Thompson influenced the past few generations with his invention of Gonzo Journalism. His work and antics will live on to influence even more generations to come. I paid tribute to Hunter S Thompson and his work with my portrait and article on my artist's blog at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot...
WORD! This article is as long as the freakin Rum Diaries. I did get Depp picked a director I never heard of but he has a hard on for Thompson like the rest of us so it's gotta b sick.
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