GONZO: THE LIFE AND WORK OF DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON sss Written and directed by Alex Gibney
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Alex Gibney’s last two feature documentaries, Taxi to the Dark Side (about the U.S. military’s torture of detainees) and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, are more important works of journalism than anything Thompson could bring himself to write in his later years. Compared to those movies, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson feels a little soft and boomer-indulgent with its 10,000th rehash of the Nixon years and its soundtrack of trite 60s anthems. Gibney succeeds in dispelling Thompson’s cartoonish persona, returning the focus to his writing and celebrating its force and moral clarity. And some of the people interviewed are admirably honest in observing how Thompson betrayed his talent and let down his readers. Yet Gonzo shies away from assessing Thompson’s legacy in our modern media landscape, where a degraded gonzoism has only added to the cacophony.
In a sense, though, the real Hunter Thompson stands up only in his own words, generously supplied in voice-over by his solemn acolyte Johnny Depp (who played him in Terry Gilliam’s 1998 adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). The excerpt from Hell’s Angels, in which Thompson describes a white-knuckled spin on his Harley, is enough to remind you how high he could soar when the spirit overtook him: “It was always at night, like a werewolf, that I would take the thing out for an honest run down the coast. I would start in Golden Gate Park, thinking only to run a few long curves to clear my head… but in a matter of minutes I’d be out at the beach with the sound of the engine in my ears, the surf booming up on the sea wall and a fine empty road stretching all the way down to Santa Cruz… that’s when the strange music starts…. The Edge… there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”
Gonzo ends on a hollow note, with the lavish memorial Depp staged in Aspen for a crowd of some 280 glitterati and friends. (Per Thompson’s request, his ashes were shot out of a cannon.) Though Gibney tries to connect Thompson to the present by drawing parallels between Vietnam and the Iraq war, the fact that Thompson ended his career writing a self-indulgent blog for ESPN raises a more complicated issue: now that the news business is being colonized by celebrity commentators with their own self-serving agendas and ideologues barricaded in their bedrooms, how can we trust the accuracy or impartiality of anything we read or hear? In a way, Thompson’s rabid followers in the 70s were just early practicers of “cocooning,” or seeking out news that flatters your political biases to the exclusion of news that doesn’t. His boiling vitriol and satirical fictions seemed liberating then, but he might have been less free with his words if he’d realized his literary heir would be Ann Coulter. How’s that for a savage journey?v
