Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson: Documentary.Movie review: 'Gonzo' - portrait of a
Hunter Thompson was a significant figure in American journalism and a colorful presence in popular culture, and he gets the documentary he deserves in "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson." The film is thorough and entertaining. It's enthusiastic about his contributions, but it's no hagiography, and it serves as both a celebration and a cautionary tale.
Indeed, there are so many lessons, professional pointers and observations to be gleaned about writing and living from watching this story that it might be best to take these points one at time:
1. How to be a journalist: Most kids who imitate Thompson - those who want to be "new journalists" - go in for flashy writing. That's fine. But successful New Journalism combines idiosyncratic, personal observation with old-fashioned foot work. Thompson wrote about the Hells Angels only after riding with them for a year. He wrote about the 1972 presidential campaign after spending a year following George McGovern around. He worked hard, at least in the beginning. New Journalism is real journalism.
2. How not to be a journalist: Making yourself part of the story can be a good thing. Making yourself the whole story is a mistake, and there's a thin membrane between the two approaches. Thompson crossed it when he had the arrogance to get drunk and go swimming rather than attend the Ali-Foreman fight, even though he was assigned to cover it. Arrogance in a writer is like dynamite, a necessary substance but one that, if handled improperly, will inevitably blow the writer up, sometimes for good.
3. Fame is dangerous: It can ruin a journalist as easily as it can ruin an artist, and Thompson, who was essentially both, was definitely damaged by it. Though Thompson complained about fame, he embraced it. He played a version of himself on the world stage, and the minute he started doing that, his best work was behind him.
4. You want to write? Avoid drugs and alcohol: Sure, drugs and alcohol fueled a few incandescent years for Thompson, but once it's admitted that Thompson was good because he was a good writer and not because he was a substance abuser, the ways in which his habits cut short his creative period become clear.
Beyond the obvious, that drugs and alcohol sucked his vitality and damaged his health, those substances also pickled him in a set of ideas and attitudes that he'd developed as a young man. What comes through between the lines of "Gonzo" is that Thompson didn't grow as a thinker or as a writer. His preoccupation with the "death of the American dream," which was at the heart of his important work, became the reflexive prism through which he interpreted everything.
It's ironic that the man who foretold the end of 1960s idealism should have been so frozen in the attitudes of that period. Was it drugs? Was it fame? Was it the drug of fame mixing with the other drugs and alcohol? Whatever it was, Thompson remained, at heart, a self-protective sentimentalist, with a tendency to fall in love and fall in hate with great intensity, all with the borderline irrationality of an adolescent. It's an ironic thing about adolescent absolutism in a mature person: It makes a fellow seem much older than he is, as if he hasn't bothered to have a second thought in years.
Looking back, it's hard to believe that in the mid-1980s, when Thompson was writing his column in the San Francisco Examiner - still railing about Nixon, who'd been driven from office a dozen years earlier - he was only in his late 40s. Those should have been Thompson's prime years, or rather the beginning of his prime. Instead he wrote like a talented relic. Again, kids: Don't do drugs.
Finally, in 2005, Thompson took the Hemingway way out, with a shotgun, following the example of another exceptional writer who was brilliant in his youth, lived too long as a legend and eventually chose suicide. The various talking heads have different interpretations of Thompson's final act, some seeing it as an act of courage, others as an act of cowardice. His first wife sees it as cowardice, and she makes a good case.
But the nice thing about this movie - directed by Alex Gibney ("Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," "Taxi to the Dark Side") - is that you can see it in any number of ways. Everything you've read here just tells you how I saw it. There are other ways of seeing it, equally satisfying, to be sure, and all of them testimonies to the compelling nature of this life and the virtues of a fine documentary.
-- Advisory: Drug use, nudity, strong language.
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