You're just about ready to ride in a convertible then, aren't you?
The spectacle and notion of working on an assignment completely ripped on a cocktail of heinous chemicals is thrilling. It makes the whole ordeal much harder, pushing you helplessly to a mental and physical collapse until you wake up to find reams of gibberish. This is one way of turning a painful assignment with harsh acidulous undertones into something doable. Maybe writing and excessive intoxication go well together, or the inebriation from the ink is stronger than whatever ugly thing I can load my body up with, whatever the case may be, the fingers don’t stop, the sheets never cease coming and the mind never stops racing.
Now here’s a film I’ve watched countless times, writing up this review should be a walk in the park huh? The problem, I think, would be to fight against the unstoppable force of this short review turning into a needlessly detailed essay spanning hundreds of pages. Let’s leave that there and continue with the matter at hand. Interpreted from my favourite book so far, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) is Terry Gilliam’s fabulously twisted vision of the book, breathing a knock-out hurricane of visual excess into a book that already makes the inside of your mind look like neon nightmare while reading it. I always say to the people I know that a book isn’t adapted, it is interpreted, but the furious vision Terry Gilliam has of the book does it such beautiful justice that it comes pretty goddamn close to representing it as an adaptation. From the very first wipe pan, the film straps you onto a frenetic rocket careening back and forth wildly from one debaucherously questionable situation to the next as Raoul Duke, Hunter S. Thompson’s exaggerated alter-ego, and his unhinged attorney set out to work on two assignments in Las Vegas with his attorney; the Mint 500 Race and the National Districts Attorney Conference for Dangerous Drugs, but underneath the slimy surface of these gross events is a repugnant stream of terror, lies and corruption, the painful side-effects of the American Dream, which is really what he is interested in. The number of drugs consumed by the pair on their journey will make you feel high just by watching them flip between tense scenarios, evading authorities and the incredibly fucked up nature of America.
Your eyes will find it difficult to take themselves off the psychedelic nightmare that’s exploding open within the dazzling set design and the dizzyingly kinetic camera work which plunges you right into their oscillating minds.
First watchers beware, go into this film with subtitles switched on because half the dialogue is mumbled through drug gripped lips, and as much as I love how accurate and representative of drug talk it is, it may pose as a challenge for people to follow the story if you can barely make out what they’re saying. That and the nature of the assignments and their undertones that make up the story don’t make it easy for first time audiences to really grasp the events of the film, it’s definitely the sort of film that requires multiple viewings, if not only for the vast number of little details to the historical period of the time that are dotted around the background. You’ll always hear me pipe up first about reading the source material before the film, not only will it assist your venture into the experience but the film won’t get in the way of the first-time image the book will conjure up in your head.
A nightmarish phantasmagoria of psychedelic neon makes the film feel like a trip escalating out of control. Dealing in subjectivity, I’m thrown right into the midst of their drug frenzy each time I watch it with colourful flashing lighting beaming uncontrollably out of the set, gaining intensity the more intoxicated and wilder they become, leaving me with the unshakable feeling of blissful confusion when drugs begin to take hold of me and the lighting begins to misbehave before my very eyes. Throughout the film, the camera takes some pretty crazy angles that messed with my perception, and moves around in such an uncontrollable manner, because much like the characters, never is the camera sober for one moment. And in such a world as this, what reason would the camera have to be sober? The goddamn set design, whether it be the pristine hotel rooms they turn into a madhouse, the sixth Reich Casino Circus and all the terrible trashy parts of town, is a house of pandemonium and packed with such activity and destruction that the eyes bounce around from one little imperceptible detail to another.
Dialogue taken word for word out of the book is brilliant and blends the poignantly thought provoking when it comes to politics, the death of the hippy movement and the grim realities of America with hilarious wit and a devil-may-care attitude. One little trick the film plays with the dialogue is the seamless blending of diegetic dialogue and non-diegetic narration, adding more unreliable depth and substance abused feeling to the dialogue from the book.
Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro playing Duke and Dr. Gonzo respectively play their characters with such terrifying craziness, their beastly vibrations bouncing off one another and embodying two human torpedoes on a mission to transgress every boundary imaginable.
Coming to the soundtrack and soundscape they dance around each other, leaving the ears flummoxed. The needledropped tracks are some goddamn iconic songs from that era, but what I love more so is how the soundscape changes to the state and drugs used by Duke and Gonzo. Pitch shifting from carnivalesque to garbled as they stumble around the formica paved wasteland of Las Vegas incriminated me into their subjectivity just as much as the visuals, put them both together and they crush me flat underneath their influence.
The come down never comes if you keep loading up on astronomical substances. And that’s exactly how the film leaves you, as Duke’s car roars away and the credits roll over the US Interstate, you feel like a stunning daze has suffused over your mind and that a swivet of a party is in order. I highly recommend this film if you’re at all a reader of Hunter S. Thompson’s work or are into the head film because this one is a modern monument to the head films.
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