Terry Gilliam's Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas was originally a project under the supervision of Alex Cox (Repo Man); he, however, clashed with the studio (Universal), which brought in Gilliam. Gilliam, incidentally, has gone from all-out war with Universal over Brazil to a very healthy working relationship; previously, they had also brought him in to do Twelve Monkeys, which had suited his personality very well. The same isn't quite true of this movie, but it's a very strong, and surprisingly cohesive work.
At left in a still from the movie is Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro), and at right is Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp); the two stand underneath a giant pink gorilla, and although the image is funny, it's not really representative of the movie. Gonzo is Duke's lawyer, though not in any legal sense. He's a worthless friend who's tagging along as Duke heads to Las Vegas to cover dirtbike racing for "Sports Illustrated." From the very beginning, we know that the duo won't escape the movie unscathed, as Duke annnounces through voice-over that "We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine..." As the movie opens, both Gonzo and Duke (yes, as in Doonesbury's Uncle Duke, who was inspired by Hunter S. Thompson, author of the book Fear And Loathing) are stoned out of their gourds. Gonzo's driving, which is a good thing, since Duke is seeing bats (and frantically announces, "We can't stop here! This is BAT COUNTRY!"). Duke and Gonzo arrive at their hotel, and then the real partying begins.Over the course of two days, the pair wreck two hotel rooms, threaten a waitress with sexual assault, pick up an underage kid (Christina Ricci) and dump her unceremoniously, and generally exist in a permanent haze, blowing off their assignment. When Duke finally wakes up at the end of the movie and realizes exactly how much shit he's done, the movie takes on a deeply sad tone.
This isn't exactly prime Gilliam material. It has nothing to do with dreamers, romance or non-traditional storytelling. The reason he was called in was because Thompson's novel had been called "unfilmable", and everyone knows that Gilliam specializes in filming the unfilmable. The result is a movie that always looks superb, and is tightly done, but whose themes seem to come either from Alex Cox or from a previously unseen side of Gilliam. And who knows? Gilliam, after all, used to be a radical protestor, and this movie's elegiac tribute to the death of 60s idealism just might come from Gilliam himself. (I never read the book). Duke identifies his drug habit as stemming from a 60s concert; he used to take the drugs because he though they would uplift him, or something like that. Now, he takes them to disconnect from reality. And that is the movie's higher theme. The harrowing scenes of Del Toro and Depp (both excellent, by the way) trashing their room are surely one of the best arguments against drug use I've ever seen. A well-done, atypical Gilliam, that segues from first-hour comedy to second-hour elegy and tragedy.
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