Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas

Some of America's finest filmmakers have failed to bring Hunter S. Thompson's Gonzo classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to the screen. The reason is simple: beneath the book's drug-fueled verbiage, pompous and hypocritical radical politics and calmly hysterical paranoia nothing really happens -- just a couple of sodden assholes doing drugs, taking in the sights, and abusing passing strangers. In his exhausting, inevitably uneven adaptation, Terry Gilliam has solved the problem, sort of, moving beyond parody to touch on the pathos of Thompson's pose, and suggesting that the chief object of his fear and loathing is Thompson himself.

As Raoul Duke, Johnny Depp not only metamorphoses into Thompson, embodying his voice, gestures, and gait (his rubber-legged reel during an ether binge is physical comedy at its finest) but suggests the innocent bystander within witnessing the spectacle with aghast amusement. Equally, Benicio Del Toro inhabits the bulk (he put on 40 pounds for the role) of Duke's attorney and sidekick, Dr. Gonzo, with a melancholy restraint that makes his episodes of mania all the more assaultive. Mostly, though, it's Gilliam's sense of irony that makes this a hilarious trip to the hellish heart of one American dream. He knows his way around a drug scene, all right, from the bats and reptiles to the subtle expansion of dimensions, intensity of light and gentle rocking of what should be stable. And he knows the squalor -- comic in the voiceover description taken from Thompson's prose, repellent in vomit-caked reality. Fear and Loathing opens with a quote from Dr. Johnson: "He who makes a beast of himself forgets the pain of being a man." Gilliam's film forces us to remember. At the Showcase and Starcase cinemas.

-- Peter Keough