The Rum Diary: Now with LSD
THE RUM DIARY Depp’s sunglasses look absolutely fantastic in their costarring role.
Tools
The mere fact that a movie is based on a book by Hunter S. Thompson does not mean that the movie must include LSD. In the case of the book The Rum Diary, the intoxicant of choice is, thoroughly, rum. LSD does not appear in the book, which is a fictionalized account of young Hunter S. Thompson’s drunk time as a journalist in San Juan, Puerto Rico, around 1960. LSD probably would have been very hard to come by in Puerto Rico around 1960, and yet a very down-at-the-heels character produces some, saying it’s what the CIA gives to communists and that you take it by eye-droppering it into your eyes (it is liquid acid, naturally). Then there is an obligatory scene where they wait, and nothing happens, and then his sidekick’s tongue grows hideously long (except it’s CGI, so it’s fakey-hideously long) while the young Thompson character, played by Johnny Depp, lightly freaks out. Having switched movies to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson/Depp then has a forgettable revelation while conversing with a lobster. Then we switch back.
The movie The Rum Diary is stylized and slick—where the book had grit, on-screen the grit is so pretty, you want to lick it. Depp’s sunglasses look absolutely fantastic in their costarring role, and the shots of perfect, shiny convertibles driving along improbably well-paved coastal-jungle roads are breathtaking. The sanitization of the book may be for the best; its blatant sexism and racism are cushioned to be slightly less blatant, and whoever wrote all the extra dialogue did a fine job of supplying Depp with good things to put his mouth around. There’s some humor, too (“Is it the clap?” “It’s a standing ovation”), though it’s eroded by the sweetening and starching of the Thompson character. In the book, he drifts along on a tide of rum, gathering often-callow observations; in the movie, he falls in love and crusades about Real Journalism. The happily-ever-after pabulum on the title cards at the end is the worst offense to Thompson’s work, and to his spirit. He is surely rolling obstreperously in his grave. 
And that's not a good thing.
6
Like, say, Dick's. Or Mecca. Or wherever. Thaiger food?
Not that LSD should have been in the movie, but why do you say this? What reason is there to believe that LSD would have been very hard to come by at a popular vacation spot in 1960?
I loved this book in part because of all of its flaws. And loved the morose-ness of it all. Like Raymond Carver in the tropics. And they go shine all that off. Ugh. I should just go a bottle of rum instead of seeing this.
10
But even with that and Alfred Hubbard sharing the stuff with thousands of people, along with the CIA experimenting with it in ways that were hardly controlled, I can see how it strains credulity to suggest that one could just stumble upon it at the time and in that particular place. So, after some thought, it probably was hard to come by. And Bethany's point about it being obviously forced in the film is exactly right.
12
The big break for Puerto Rican tourism was three-fold: "Operation Bootstrap", the US program to move the island economy away from agriculture into manufacturing and tourism; the advent of Pan Am's 707 flights in late 1958; and the closure of Havana after Castro's revolution. So, yeah, technically, tourism was underway. But not on anything like the mass scale that it would become. PR was an obvious destination for a journalist in 1960, but not for tourists, and the explosion had just begun. Not exactly Cancun yet (Cancun didn't yet exist).
Thompson of course was a great bullshitter. I haven't read the book -- life's far too short to read Hunter frigging Thompson's unpublished juvenilia, or anyone's really -- but it is clear from just the stills of this movie that it is yet another vehicle for Johnny Depp to play Johnny Depp, not a real look at the sixties. And Thompson himself has been forever reduced in the public eye to a meager collection of cliches.
I'm more than a little disappointed when Hollywood casts celebrities that have aged well beyond the characters they portray, as is the case with this film.
Depp has done some great work in my opinion (it’s been a long while) and I do enjoy HST’s writing. But again, Fnarf has probably nailed it.
Too bad, this could’ve been a gritty film. Grit would be more suitable than gloss.
Whatever helps pay for the Botox injections, I guess.
14
Also by Bethany Jean Clement
RSS
Twitter
Comments (14) RSS