DVD Review: Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson/Mad Money

Published on Wednesday 8 April 2009 15:53

THANKS TO THE CONCERTED EFfort the late Hunter S Thompson made to become the centre of the story, it's hardly surprising that his bourbon-necking, drug-guzzling, gun-toting outlaw persona has obscured the real reason he shot to fame: his writing.

Thompson came to prominence during the golden age of magazine journalism and pushed the form as far as it would go, eventually inventing a new style known as Gonzo, a tripped-out spin on New Journalism in which he applied subjective, often crazily-outlandish first-person narrative devices to traditional reportage to get at the truth of a situation. The welcome thing about the mundanely titled Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson (imaginative, huh?) is that unlike a lot of coverage of Thompson, it is just as interested in his prose as his pose.

Unearthing a treasure trove of archival material (Thompson was nothing if not meticulous about his legacy), the film takes us right up to his shotgun suicide and beyond, but the bulk of it focuses on the ten-year period that gave birth to his best work: Hells Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and his masterpiece of political reporting, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. With those three works, along with his many assignments as the current affairs editor of the fledgling American rock bible Rolling Stone magazine (assignments for which spawned the latter two books), Thompson established himself as a true and original voice in America, someone who wore his heart on his sleeve and wasn't afraid to write passionately about everything he loved and despised about his country.

Thompson's writing and exuberant persona won him a lot of admirers, and not all of them from the most obvious of places. Amid the usual suspects rounded up here (Ralph Steadman, Johnny Depp, Tom Wolfe) is right-wing Republican Pat Buchanan, who at the time of Thompson's most incisive period of political reporting was an advisor to the writer's bte noire, Richard Nixon. Naturally, the overwhelmingly positive nature of the testimonies being paid here helps fuel the Thompson myth a little, but director Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) is nobody's fool, and as much as you're left respecting Thompson's fire and talent, you're also left feeling angry that he didn't respect it enough himself to keep going.

Pop quiz: which of the following is the most creatively bankrupt? a) A lame Hollywood heist movie; b) a lame Hollywood heist movie that wastes the talents of one of funniest screen actresses of all time; or c) a lame Hollywood heist movie that wastes the talents of one of funniest screen actresses because it's really a remake of a 2001 Granada TV comedy-drama starring Caroline Quentin? Of course, the answer is all of the above, though it's Mad Money's status as a redo of a naff Brit telly film called Hot Money that gives this bland Diane Keaton comedy a whiff of desperation. Directed by Thelma & Louise screenwriter Callie Khouri, Keaton plays a formerly wealthy housewife forced to take a job as a cleaner when the economy takes a downturn. The timeliness of the tale is the only thing that can't be faulted as Keaton winds up working at the Federal Reserve, where she ropes in kooky Katie Holmes and single mother Queen Latifah to repeatedly rob small batches of bills earmarked for destruction. Less interested in making a point about how tough an economic pinch can be than it is in reiterating tired old platitudes about gal-pal solidarity, an absence of jokes, tension or even consequence robs this of any reason to see it.