Signis

The Rum Diary

(JPEG)

US, 2012, Johnny Depp, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Rispoli, Giovanni Ribisi, Amber Heard, Richard Jenkins. Directed by Bruce Robinson.

In 1998, Johnny Depp played the journalist, Hunter S. Thompson, in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Thompson began his journalistic career in the 1960s, investigative journalism that pulled no punches. It got the nickname, Gonzo journalism. Thompson also lived a fairly reckless life, not without a significant amount of drugs. He shot himself in 2005.

The Rum Diary was a Thompson novel about a young writer in Puerto Rico in 1960, trying to establish himself, despite a capacity for hard drinking, his rum diary. Without quite realising it, he allows himself to be swayed by a wheeler-dealer to write articles favaourable to a tourist development on the site of an American arms-testing base. He also becomes infatuated with the smooth-talking but ruthless agent’s girl-friend. The entanglement does him no good, except to test his integrity. At the same time, his newspaper is collapsing, the editor doing a run, the staff on strike.

This is the core of The Rum Diary, a thinly disguised autobiographical novel by Thompson.

It offers an opportunity to see Johnny Depp doing some serious acting, forgetting his outings as Captain Jack Sparrow, Willy Wonka and The Mad Hatter which are definitely a matter of taste.

Aaron Eckhart has no trouble in being the wheeler dealer, a smoothly nasty piece of work. Richard Jenkins is the harassed editor and Giovanni Ribisi is eccentricity personified as a drug-addled fellow journalist. Some of the scenes are stolen by Michael Rispoli as the newspaper’s photographer who gets caught up in all these adventures (and the rum).

The film was written and directed by Bruce Robinson who was one of the up and coming film-makers of the 1980s, especially with his ironic comedy, Withnail and I. However, Robinson them embarked on his own rum and drugs diary and it has taken two decades for him to move back into film-making.

The film suddenly stops and tells us that this was the beginning of a Gonzo journalistic life. We know the sequel already.

Peter Malone