Film Review | The Rum Diary

Alcohol and drugs are bad for you.

And yet, they remain one of the most popular commodities in the world, and I would hazard to say that for all the permutations that the world has gone through so far and that it will continue to go experience from now until Armageddon (be that in 2012 or later).

Nowhere are drugs and alcohol considered to be more friendly than in the field of art - and don't let the otherwise quaint world of 'letters' deceive you: authors are privy to it too.

There have been numerous lumbering saddoes among the alcoholic writers of history: Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allen Poe and even the still-living but reformed Cormac McCarthy come to mind. Few, however, have actually taken to the bottle - not to mention other more potent substances - with as much relish as Hunter S. Thompson.

The author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas famously said: "I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me."

And the Johnny Depp-starring, Terry Gilliam directed Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) contained a fair share of drugs and craziness, and didn't shy away from depicting the manic lifestyle of the self-styled 'Gonzo' journalist Thompson, who, among other things, was notorious for his poison pen throughout the 60s and 70s... particularly for being Richard Nixon's scourge at the height of the corrupt president's power.

Exactly why Thompson struck up a friendship with Depp while the film star was researching the (highly autobiographical, on Thompson's part) role is anybody's guess, and can probably be put down to the vagaries of the cult author's enigmatic personality.

However, a friendship did blossom (Depp even oversaw Thompson's typically eccentric funeral wishes, loading up his ashes to be shot out as fireworks), and Depp continued to champion The Rum Diary, a prospective adaptation of one of Thompson's earlier works - which was only published in 1998... again, largely thanks to Depp's pep-talk.

The long-gestating labour of love is finally here, six years after Thompson's passing and brought to life by another reclusive auteur: Withnail and I (1987) writer-director Bruce Robinson, a Brit whose brush in Hollywood, following the huge success of the aforementioned junkie two-hander, nearly made him give up on the industry as a whole.

The Rum Diary does sound like the perfect project for Robinson, at least on paper. Like Withnail, it centres on drug-addled characters living around the edges of society. Our protagonist is Paul Kemp (Depp), a young journalist struggling to make a buck and find his voice as a writer (he complains of having 'two-and-a-half' unfinished, unpublishable novels under his belt). Travelling to Puerto Rico to join the staff of the ailing English-language newspaper The San Juan Star, Kemp befriends its photographer Bob Sala (Michael Rispoli) and the erratic 'derelict crime and religion' correspondent Moberg (a surprisingly, delightfully off-the-rails Giovanni Ribisi), all of whom are hounded by their stress-wracked editor Edward Lotterman (Richard Jenkins), who knows he's manning a sinking ship but hasn't quite figured out how to escape it yet.

Kemp's fortune appears to take a turn for the better when his writing skills attract the attention of wealthy American businessman Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart), who wants to destroy a nearby island to create a lavish holiday resort, destroying the lives of locals in the process.

Sanderson hopes that the naïve Kemp will take up his offer to package his development plan in the most palatable way possible in the press, but when Kemp falls for Sanderson's attractive trophy wife Chenault (Amber Heard), things get a little too heady to handle.

On atmosphere and dialogue alone, The Rum Diary is a triumph: characters are sketched out with firm (if not exactly substantial) strokes - packed with plenty of memorable lines - and the vintage-style, rough-and-ready cinematography succeeds in evoking the sweaty, dingy morass of Eisenhower-era Puerto Rico.

Unfortunately, the whole doesn't quite hang together as a film in its own right. Like the source material, the story - such as it is - is a largely autobiographical account of Thompson's time in Puerto Rico, and by necessity lacks the dramatic tautness required to stitch a satisfying film together. It's commendable, of course, that Robinson didn't go the gimmicky route by refraining to shoehorn a plot contrivance or two to smoothen things along, but as the rolling narrative grinds to a thud, you begin to wonder whether maybe, just maybe, a few tweaks would have made something great out of something that's just good.

Still, I'm sure this would make nice back-to-back viewing with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - seeing both Depp and Thompson go from subdued to berserk is bound to be a treat.