It Takes A Madman

Since I recently wrote about a movie that did not live up to its novel, and since I have more of that ilk on the way, I thought I would write at least one positive review where a movie not only lived up to its novel, but succeeded in being a great film in its own right.

Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas is hilarious, bizarre, and genuinely insightful as a novel. It’s lively and easy to read, and I always found it so interesting that no matter how absurd the action, Hunter S. Thompson could write about it in a clear and flowing voice.

That is perhaps one of the main differences between the novel and the film, because while the read is quite smooth, the film is rather challenging to watch. It’s so packed with wild characters and scenery and there’s such constant movement, it feels chaotic. It’s one of those movies that gets better with re-watches, because the first time it’s so stimulating it becomes disorienting.

But that is the only right way to adapt this novel to the screen, the only way to capture the energy and the rhythm, even if it makes for a bit of an overwhelming experience–that is actually one of its strengths, I think. And because so many background details are packed into every scene, the film is also very complete in what it captures from the novel.

There are some differences, of course. There is a section of the novel that is left out of the movie entirely, in which Duke and Dr. Gonzo go looking for an actual location called The American Dream, and all they manage to find are rumors of some abandoned nightclub that became a smack-house.

That’s the other thing the film has to sacrifice to some extent, the social commentary. The film shows us some of the social commentary in an almost cartoonish way, which is the right choice for the tone of the movie, in my opinion, but it means we lose some of the incisiveness of the novel.

However, what we gain from this sacrifice is a film that has a strong and unique voice, and a film that plays with its medium, two highly elusive qualities of the novel that almost no other director could have pulled off on screen. The film is as much a Terry Gilliam creation as a Hunter Thompson one, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

In all, I think this adaptation succeeded in the best way an adaptation can, it followed the source material very closely, but transformed it into a film with a unique personality of its own. Rather than having a greater and a lesser form of this story, the film and the novel actually compliment each other, they make each other better.

As a side note I’ll mention that there is another great movie adaptation of some HST stories called Where The Buffalo Roam. It’s a lot less of an onslaught than Fear And Loathing, and I like Bill Murray’s take on Raoul Duke/HST as much as Johnny Depp’s (I know they weren’t quite playing the same person/character but you know what I mean).

The Rum Diary, on the other hand, was more of an insult to its source material than a proper adaptation, please avoid it if you can.

But what do you think? Is Fear And Loathing one of the best novel-to-film adaptations ever? Let me know in the comments, thanks for reading!

Giblundus