Gonzo The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson...Buy the ticket, take the ride.
Added 11/17/2009
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson: 6 out of 10: Is Hunter S Thompson any more relevant to modern journalism than Joe Namath is to modern football? After all, both were men of their times. In addition, both faded badly by the mid-seventies. Thompson's early work is excellent (a copy of "The Proud Highway" sits on my bookshelf) and reached its pinnacle with Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72.
A mere three years later Rolling Stone publisher Jenn Warner had become so fed up with Thompson he basically tried to have him killed.
As [...] puts it "Then, early one evening in March 1975, Hunter was watching a nightmarish film of the evacuation of Da Nang on the evening news. The phone rang, and Hunter picked it up. It was Wenner, saying, "How would you like to go to Vietnam?" Hunter could not resist. The collapse of the American empire was a happening tailor-made for his talents. Within days, he was heading out over the Pacific. He arrived in Saigon hours after Thieu's palace had been bombed and staffed by his own Air Force. For a man who lived with the conviction that the world was going to end next Monday, this was an especially ominous portent. Thompson had the sense of "walking into a death camp." This was it. He would never get out alive. As it turned out, the fate that was in store for him was even worse. Thompson discovered that, even as he was on his way to Vietnam, Wenner had taken him off retainer - in effect, fired him - and with the retainer went his staff benefits, including health and life insurance." Also leaving him no way out of Vietnam... a one-way ticket if you will.
Dude that is cold...
And that is the very nature of the problem with this documentary. Why is not this story mentioned? Who knows? It certainly was a turning point in Thompsons life (He apparently became more withdrawn and paranoid afterwards... understandably so)
Gonzo is a pollyanna look at Thompson. The abuse of his first marriage gets a glancing look and all the interviewees (Including Jimmy Carter, Pat Buchanan and Jenn Werner) seem hesitant to speak ill of the dead.
The fact that in a few short years Thompson turned from a well-respected writer into a Muppet and Doonesbury cartoon is not covered well. The fact is mentioned but the reasons are glossed over. It is as if the film is worried that by mentioning his failures it will reduce his significance.
Yet, I would argue that Thompson's effect on Journalism is larger than he gets credit for. Reporters nowadays often ignore facts, concentrating instead on how events make them feel. Anderson Cooper crying during the Hurricane Katrina coverage threatened to become a bigger story than the storm itself. (He was not helped when fellow Mensa candidate Wolf Blitzer said "You simply get chills every time you see these poor individualsmany of these people, almost all of them that we see are so poor and they are so black")
The documentary never really focuses on this aspect either. Gonzo seems to fear pulling back any of the masks its subject wears presumably scared of what it might find. Gonzo would have been better served concentrating on one period of time and focusing its energies.
That said, for those unfamiliar with Hunter S Thompson outside of his Muppet form this is a good start. Moreover, if it gets people to read his early work so much the better.
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Too Heavy-Handed
Added 11/11/2009
After watching the documentary "Gonzo" about Hunter Thompson I decided that Hunter Thompson and Truman Capote are very similar: both are talented but uneducated writers who became cultural icons, and in so doing died as writers. As Glenn Beck chronicles brilliantly in his biography "Capote," Truman Capote reached the pinnacle of his career with the publication of "In Cold Blood," and even though he was still in his thirties he would spend the rest of his life engaged in drunken debauchery and tragically comic romances.
I don't know enough about Hunter Thompson to know when he reached the pinnacle of his career but according to the documentary "Gonzo" he reached it after his political reporting during the 1972 Presidential election. Suddenly more famous than the people he was covering he could no longer write. His life ended when the George Bush presidency (and the specter of Nixon returning to haunt America yet again) drove Hunter Thompson to kill himself. Thus, Hunter Thompson was America's social conscience.
Alex Gibney is obviously a skilled documentary director. He had to assemble all of Hunter Thompson's writings, the impressive array of media coverage and Hollywood productions about or inspired by him, two decades of American cultural history, and interviews with all the famous people who knew him into a two-hour documentary -- and so "Gonzo" was a work of passion. And the editing is truly superb, weaving together a lot of disjointed material into occasional sparks of insight. However impressive the production quality the documentary is still overwrought and bloated -- two hours is a really long time to sit around watching Hunter Thompson being Hunter Thompson, and after the first hour I really wanted to leave.
That's the problem with many directors today -- they can't allow themselves to make something entertaining -- it has to have social value. And so "Gonzo" spends a great deal of time on how Hunter Thompson really despised Nixon for all the right reasons, and makes the inevitable comparison of Nixon to Bush. It's an affecting artifice but it's still an artifice because you can't help but feel that rather than America's social conscience Hunter Thompson was nothing more than an infantile narcissist.
Glenn Beck's biography of Truman Capote is deeply sympathetic, as you would expect from a writer who knew his subject personally and who spent thirteen years on the book. But it doesn't shy away from the fact that Truman Capote personally engineered his own destruction, and Mr. Beck does not at all blame anyone or anything else.
The unfortunate fact about Hunter Thompson was that he, like Truman Capote, was an infantile narcissist. No one asked him to take drugs. No one asked him to flaunt himself in front of the national media. No one asked him to abandon his family. He did this all to himself, and while he was a talented writer there was no truth and substance to what he wrote -- like Capote, he just sounded right but in the end he just sounded good. I remember watching the movie "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"but I can't remember what it was about -- that I think is Hunter Thompson -- he was such a outlandish character you have to remember him but what he actually said and wrote you just can't remember. "Gonzo" tries too hard to make Hunter Thompson the hero, and make a cultural icon of the seventies relevant to the post-9/11 world.
A much better documentary than "Gonzo" is "An Unreasonable Man," which is about Ralph Nader. "An Unreasonable Man" confronts all the criticisms directed at Ralph Nader, specifically how he helped George Bush by running as the Green Party candidate in 2000 -- it's an honest and serious documentary because it's about an honest and serious man who raises honest and serious questions about our political system. "Gonzo" lets us be voyeurs, and glimpse into the wild juvenile life that Hunter Thompson lead, and then asks us to take him seriously because he killed himself and railed against George W. Bush.
In this way the documentary is asking you to take it seriously -- and if you do you can also feel you've spent two hours productively. I'm sorry but I can't yet bring myself to that delusion.
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Good length, good variety of interviews, good use of supplemental material. Very excellent documentary.
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A really mixed bag...
Added 7/17/2009
It came off as too much of an "in memoriam" type celebration at times and less of a documentary. I believe the ongoing 60's music playing in the background as mentioned in other reviews kind of took away from it. I did like some of the readings from Johnny Depp.
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Good introduction to HST
Added 3/7/2009
Stylistically, this documentary doesn't really blaze any new trails. It does, however, serve as an excellent introduction to the life & works of Hunter S. Thompson. What truly sets the film apart is its refusal to sugar-coat the Doctor's life: most of the friends and associates interviewed for the film make it clear that Thompson could be, at times, an absolute jerk; everyone acknowledges that he was a writer who burned brilliantly but eventually burned out. That the filmmakers are able to include these hard but fair evaluations of their subject and still present an overall impression of Thompson as an important--perhaps even heroic--figure is testament to the quality of their artistry.
A first-rate documentary, strongly recommended.
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