Terry Gilliam is an acquired taste. The only American Python, he’s spent his career making grotesque visions of society, melding history and science together in poisonous satirical jabs at humanity’s past, present and future. I’ve liked some of them (Brazil) and struggled with others (The Fisher King). When his comedy is a little broad and his hyperactive camera swoops and zooms a little too much, I grow tired. It’s strange then, that his most full-throttle mind-splitting, disgusting, manic film is clearly his best. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a two-hour-long bad acid trip realised on an 18 million dollar budget. There’s no future and no distant past, just the horrible here and now.
Based on the book by influential gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing is the story of an ill-fated road trip that becomes a screaming elegy for the American dream. Thompson’s alter-ego Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) accompanies Samoan lawyer Dr Gonzo (Benicia Del Toro) and a suitcase full of mescaline, weed, acid, ether, cocaine and tequila as they travel from LA to Las Vegas to report on a gigantic motorbike race in the Nevada desert. The race takes up very little screen time. The rest of the film sees the pair encounter giant lizards, terrify hitchhikers, skip out on bills, take bucketloads of acid and destroy their surroundings while muttering poetically about the insanity of the Vietnam War.
The film has no clear narrative. There’s no character development, no typical dramatic beats and nothing remotely approaching a structure. Gilliam just powers on full steam ahead, joining up increasingly unhinged scenes of drugged-up excess set against the backdrop of Vegas’s ultra-tacky, ultra-gaudy casinos, hotels and conference rooms. This will either work for you, or it won’t. There’s no middle ground to be had. You’ll find it insufferable and unwatchable from the first frame or you’ll embrace it as a radical multimillion dollar experiment in how far the formal limits of cinema can be pushed until the walls of reality fall down and the camera explodes with an atomic whoooooomph.
I love it. This film is uncompromising, unapologetic art that sets out to perfectly replicate a drug binge’s rushes of euphoria and pits of sluggish misery. Anything less would have been a total sell out. Adapting this author’s work requires complete commitment to repugnant excess and endless forward movement. All of Gilliam’s hyperactive swoops and zooms, the uncomfortable wide-angle lens close-ups and light-speed editing, are beautifully suited to this project. Instead of conjuring up a gross-out dystopia where humanity has made itself ugly, Gilliam looks to our very recent past and finds more than enough grotesquerie in the hyper-capitalist citadel resting in the lifeless desert of Nixon’s warmongering, genocidal USA.
Would a sober look at this location, at this time and place, be more valuable or cinematically exciting? I think not. Gilliam responds to Thompson’s gonzo journalism with gonzo cinema, using CGI, rear projection, expressionistic lighting and reality-bending set design to capture the altered perceptions of its acid freak leads. I was reminded of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, another biting, satirical 90s film that uses every single manic trick in the book to speed itself along and keep the audience dazzled. Films made since the 90s have only slowed down. Nothing since matches the reckless speed and fierce unstoppable creativity of these two movies. Cinema has been catching its breath ever since.
Consider the film’s use of sound. Duke’s voiceovers have a lo-fi quality that suggests they’ve been recorded on an ancient cassette tape. They sound muffled and distant, a perfectly fitting technique to convey the alienating effects of heavy drug use. He always sounds like he’s outside himself, out of his own body, commenting on his own actions like a bemused spectator or a man far off in the future, looking back on his youthful misdeeds. The movie’s soundtrack is a nice mix of 60s psychedelia and pop, switching from Jefferson Airplane to Big Brother & The Holding Company as Duke’s hotel room flashes orange and purple and the lizard woman behind the check-in counter gives him a death stare. The music links the film together more effectively than the barely existent narrative. The film’s only constant is intoxication.
Think of Fear and Loathing as the all-American cousin to Britain’s Withnail and I. Both films are about the death of the 1960s counter-culture viewed through the eyes of an inebriated pair of loveable losers who go on holiday by mistake. Depp even tried to acquire the services of Withnail writer/director Bruce Robinson before Gilliam’s involvement was secured. This can only be due to the thematic synthesis between the two stories. The big difference between the films is that Withnail is typically British in its humdrum overcast mundanity. It’s a story of dirty flats, miserable pubs, worn-out furniture and lecherous homosexual uncles. Fear and Loathing is a study of all-consuming greed and revolting exuberance, a punk rock full-throttle manifesto of self-destruction as the only means of rebellion against a corrupt, hideous, guilty society actively engaging in mass murder as it beats its chest and beams with pride.
Despite its direct contravention of the typical Hollywood formula, Fear and Loathing clips along at an almighty pace and packs in memorable set-piece after memorable set-piece. When Duke reaches the motorbike race he stumbles out onto the track and finds himself trapped in the centre of a man-made sandstorm, picking through the mayhem while desperately trying to cover and protect a pint of beer. When he goes to sip it, he discovers that it’s been turned to sludge by the infiltration of the elements. Later, a flashback sees a long haired hippie eagerly licking spilled acid off Duke’s sleeve in the bathroom of a Jefferson Airplane gig in San Francisco, startling a presumably homophobic concertgoer in a suit. One scene ignores Duke and Gonzo entirely to focus on an imagined extreme interaction between a camp, merciless bellboy (Chris Meloni) and a psychotic policeman.
The film exists in a state of perfect anarchy but is successfully held together by Gilliam’s smart direction and the sharp wit of the Duke voiceover. Completely ignoring the highly-publicised issues in his personal life, Johnny Depp is an actor that I’ve never particularly appreciated. I’ve enjoyed films that he stars in, such as Ed Wood, Public Enemies and Dead Man, but I would enjoy any of these movies no matter who the lead actor was. The Pirates of the Caribbean shtick got old very quickly, and when Depp slumped into the back of end of his lengthy partnership with Tim Burton the result was monstrosities like Alice in Wonderland.
However, I’m happy to report that Depp is genuinely fantastic in Fear and Loathing, delivering an excitable, loveable performance as a thoroughly unpleasant, utterly compelling creature. The role seems more suitable for an edgy character actor like Steve Buscemi or a ferocious scenery chewer like Nicolas Cage, but Depp manages it ably, rattling off slurred quips about the collapse of western civilisation as he stumbles through a shifting, twisting neon landscape. As an addendum to Depp’s relationship with the world of Hunter S. Thompson, he became close friends with the writer during the production of Gilliam’s film and ended up funding his buddy’s 3 million dollar funeral. It climaxed with the late writer’s ashes being fired out of a cannon.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is pure experience cinema, like an earthbound gross-out 2001. In the right frame of mind, it’s a liberating jolt of radical experimentation, the distilled essence of the ultimate anarchic spirit in the ultimate anarchic age. In the wrong frame of mind, it’s a siren blaring through a hangover. Either way, it makes its impression felt. New discoveries rarely leave me this excited. Without the whimsical frippery of his earlier movies, Gilliam is liberated.
Time to write a screenplay Frank Evans ……