Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
Alex Gibney:
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (USA, 2008)
120 min. - English
“Gonzo” is the definitive film biography of a mythic American figure, a man that Tom Wolfe called our “greatest comic writer,” whose suicide, by gunshot, led Rolling Stone Magazine, where Thompson began his career, to devote an entire issue (its best-selling ever) to the man that launched a thousand sips of bourbon, endless snorts of cocaine and a brash, irreverent, fearless style of journalism - named “gonzo” after an anarchic blues riff by James Booker.
Borrowing from Kris Kristofferson, Thompson was a “walking contradiction, partly truth, mostly fiction.” A die-hard member of the NRA, he was also a coke-snorting, whiskey-swilling, acid-eating fiend. While his pen dripped with venom for crooked politicians, he surprised nervous visitors with the courtly manners and soft-spoken delivery of a Southern gentleman. Careening out of control in his personal life, Thompson also maintained a steel-eyed conviction about righting wrongs. Today, in a time, when “spin” has replaced the search for deeper meaning, Thompson remains an iconic crusader for truth, justice and a fiercely idealistic American way. Like Jack
Kerouac’s On the Road, his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas remains a wanderlust myth for generation after generation of American youth.
While documentary´s director Alex Gibney shaped the screen story, every
narrated word in the film springs from the typewriters of Thompson himself. Those words are given life by Johnny Depp, the actor who once shadowed Thompson’s every move for the screen version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and who bankrolled Thompson’s spectacular funeral in which the good doctor’s ashes were fired from a rocket launcher mounted with a towering two-thumbed fist whose palm held a giant peyote button.
The film is distinguished by its unprecedented cooperation of Thompson’s friends, family and estate. The filmmakers had access to hundreds of photographs and over 200 hours of audiotapes, home movies and documentary footage of the man. The signature of the film, however, is its focus on Thompson’s work, particularly his most provocative and productive period from 1965 to 1975.
His wicked words resonate today, at a time when politicians have become manufactured celebrities, shrouding themselves in Teflon, issuing banalities whose only value is that they rarely offend. Too often, contemporary journalists play the politicians’ game, taking them seriously with a balance they don’t deserve. Thompson never stood for that. He understood, better than any other, that when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
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ALEX GIBNEY
Alex Gibney wrote and directed the Oscar-nominated film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. His most recent film, Taxi to the Dark Side (ThinkFilm), a documentary murder mystery examining the death of an Afghan taxi driver at Bagram Air Base, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2008. Gibney is now at work on several other films.
