Don't Blame Hunter S. Thompson for the Failure of 'The Rum Diary'

The problem with the new, little-seen Johnny Depp film isn't that it appeals only to a cult audience—it's that it lacks the personality that allowed that cult to form

Film District

How famous is Hunter S. Thompson? Not famous enough to sell a movie, if you believe the president of the movie studio behind The Rum Diary. A labor of love for star Johnny Depp, the adaptation of the early Thompson novel flopped last weekend at the box office, pulling in a paltry $5 million. Surveying the damage Monday, Bob Berney, FilmDistrict president of theatrical distribution, told the Hollywood Reporter, "Probably, at the end of the day, the whole Hunter thing attracts more of a cult audience. While he and Johnny were best friends and the movie is a tribute to Hunter, Hunter is still a little too extreme for the mainstream."

Berney has the right to defend his star and film, but he was wrong to blame the bad showing on the author of the book that it's based on. If "the Hunter thing" is a cult, it's an awfully big one. The drug-addled cosmic moneywrench persona Thompson created has permeated nearly every level of pop consciousness, not only through his still-cherished writing, but also as the model for "Uncle Duke” in the comic strip Doonesbury, as a superhero in DC's comic book Transmetropolitan, and on TV as the “Hunter Gathers” character from Adult Swim's show The Venture Bros. "Gonzo," the byword for his kamikaze approach to life, gave its name to a Muppet. On film, he's been portrayed by Bill Murray inWhere the Buffalo Roam and has been the subject of nearly a dozen of documentaries. Oh, and there's Johnny Depp's previous two Thompson-inspired flicks: the 1998 cult classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and this year's well-received animated adventure Rango. If the guy was any more mainstream, a theme park in Florida would open a Hunter S. Thompson ride called “Fear and Loathing in Orlando.”

No, Depp's cinematic mash note to the late author flopped because director Bruce Robinson couldn't decide what kind of movie he wanted to make. The Rum Diary veers wildly from a buddy picture to a slapstick comedy to a remarkably pointless romance between Depp and the luminous Amber Heard, before finally settling on a tale of ragtag underdogs fighting Evil in the person of Aaron Eckhart.

More on Hunter S. Thompson
	The Hunter You Don't Know
	"He Was a Crook"
	An Interview With Hunter S. Thompson

The look and feel of The Rum Diary is almost as disjointed as the story is. The screen adaptation of Fear and Loathing succeeded creatively—and, eventually, in home-viewing sales—not only because of Depp's note-perfect performance. The film worked because director Terry Gilliam made a movie that feels like an acid trip. With weird lenses and filters, with every conceivable camera gyration, and by slathering the screen in computer-generated hallucinations, Gilliam captured the searing, drug-induced hyperperceptiveness that informs Thompson's original work. With Depp reading big chunks of the author's galloping prose as voice-over narration, all the wrecked cars and trashed hotel rooms in Fear and Loathing exist within the larger context of Thompson's moral outrage. His swath of destruction represents anarchistic lashing out at betrayals of the American Dream.

Watching Robinson's film, though, feels like imbibing a different Thompson-esque substance: the movie's namesake liquor. Whether he meant to or not, Robinson captured the muddled dissipation of a rum-soaked, sunburned trip to the Caribbean. The camera seems dazed and sleepy from the tropical sun, meandering over the bleary-eyed characters who mumble, then yell, and spend half their time in shadow—including one of the most frustratingly underlit love scenes in the history of film. Save for one great moment with a talking lobster, and a rote third act with a forced climax, nothing in the movie seems to happen for very much of a reason at all.

Whatever the film's faults, the one flaw it certainly doesn't have, no matter what some film studio executive says, is an excess of Hunter's supposedly too-extreme-for-the-mainstream personality. Very much the opposite. The film falls flat precisely because it lacks Thompson's moral watchfulness, the virtue that so often led him to pull back and rise over the craziness—often, the craziness he created—to survey, preach, and eulogize. The problem with The Rum Diary, at heart, isn't that there's too much Hunter. The problem is there isn't enough.

About the Author

Hampton Stevens is a writer based in Kansas City, Missouri. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, ESPN the Magazine, Playboy, Gawker, Maxim, and many more publications.

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, I worked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.