The other night I sat down and rewatched Howl, the 2010 indie drama about Allen Ginsberg’s epochal poem and the landmark obscenity trial that followed its publication in 1956. Writer-directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman took an admirably factual approach to their much-mythologized subject: every word of their screenplay is drawn from either trial transcripts, interviews with Ginsberg, or the poem itself. Though James Franco may seem an odd choice to play the young Allen Ginsberg, he contributes an expert impersonation, capturing every bit of the poet’s impish humor and penetrating diction. The movie is badly compromised by the third-rate, stupidly literal computer animation Epstein and Friedman use to illustrate the long stretches of recited verse, but you can avoid that by the simple expedient of closing your eyes and submitting to the powerful rhythm of Ginsberg’s words. For the most part, the filmmakers succeed at the daunting task of making “Howl” and its cultural moment seem fresh and vital again.
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The same can hardly be said of Alan Govenar’s new documentary The Beat Hotel, which opens Friday for a weeklong run at Facets Cinematheque. By the time Lawrence Ferlinghetti—whose City Lights bookstore had published Howl and Other Poems—was found not guilty of having distributed obscene materials, Ginsberg and his lover, Peter Orlovsky, had already bugged out of San Francisco and checked into a cheap, filthy rooming house in the Latin Quarter of Paris, where they would later be joined by their literary compatriots Gregory Corso and William S. Burroughs. The Beat Hotel chronicles the five-year period when the place became a nerve center of the beat generation, its 40-odd rooms occupied by an assortment of writers, artists, and musicians. But its tired combination of talking-head interviews, black-and-white photos, generic cool jazz, clumsy reenactments, and even worse animation sequences never amounts to more than a flabby piece of counterculture nostalgia.
I was particularly annoyed by the movie’s cartoonish portrayal of Burroughs, whose stay at the hotel coincided with his editing of Naked Lunch and his growing friendship with the visual artist Brion Gysin (one result of which was the cut-up technique of word collage that would dominate Burroughs’s work for more than a decade). The Beat Hotel drove me back not only to the “Howl” movie but also to Howard Brookner’s alternately hilarious and heartrending documentary Burroughs (1983). In contrast to the cryptic, fedora-wearing character of The Beat Hotel, the man revealed in Burroughs is both vengefully angry at the heterosexual world that forced him to the margins and haunted by how badly he failed his wife and his son, William Jr., who died at 33 after years of alcoholism. In short, the older film captures a real person, whereas The Beat Hotel seems more like an empty room littered with food cartons after the guests have moved out, and moved on.
Directed by Alan Govenar
