Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson.

Alex Gibney's Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson is a tender, even-tempered elegy to a writer who at his peak could ingest staggering (literally) amounts of drugs and alcohol and transform, like Popeye after a can of spinach, into a superhuman version of himself - more trenchant, more cutting, more hilarious than any political journalist before or since," writes David Edelstein in New York. "No one but Thompson succeeded in being at once so addled and so lucid - and after a while, tragically, neither did Thompson."

"Gibney eschews narrative conventions and switches point of view on a dime, creating a prism of interviews and episodes that gradually assembles into a compelling portrait," writes David Carr in the New York Times. "In his long-running fever dream about America and its abundant pathologies, the bald man, with the tumbler of whiskey and head full of Schedule 1 narcotics, captured not only a mood - your government is not your friend - but many realities of civic life, most notably that if candidates were willing to do what it takes to get elected, they would probably arrive in office corrupted beyond hope."

Updated through 7/4.

"More illuminating than McGovern campaign manager Gary Hart's acid assessment of Thompson's oddly romantic worldview - a black-and-white arena where politics is 'all fun, all amusing, all good-and-evil over-dramatizing' - is Pat Buchanan's fond remembrance," notes Jim Ridley in the Voice. "Still, shooting in the snarky vein of his Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room rather than the cold fury of his Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, director Gibney relies too often on glib simplification. He offers up a vague anecdote about Thompson's early run-in with the Louisville police as if it were some sort of defining Rosebud, while skimming the last 25 years of Thompson's life in about 20 minutes of screen time. But if these are misdemeanors, Gibney's music montages are felonies: smirky pairings of golden oldies and stock-footage upheaval - a Social Unrest Classic Rock Weekend."

"[D]espite its resources and Behind the Music fade-out, Gonzo doesn't truly dig past Thompson's familiar mythos," writes Nicolas Rapold. "This is a common shortcoming among biographical documentaries (if not, ordinarily, Mr Gibney's), but the two-hour chronicle that is Gonzo is especially disappointing because, well, no one told stories about Hunter S Thompson better than Hunter S Thompson, who did so in the course of crafting genuine insights about his putative subject matter."

Also in the New York Sun: "'It actually speaks of him from within his era, showing the way he fought in his own time to take on the social system, the political system, and the world in general,' the artist Ralph Steadman, Thompson's longtime collaborator, said. 'It also gets that manic balance just right, showing how Hunter could go right to the edge, would push to the edge in hopes of shocking people, and then pull back at just the last second.'" From S James Snyder's conversation.

Joshua Rothkopf, writing in Time Out New York, finds it "a valuable reclamation of the political from the personal. Terry Gilliam and Johnny Depp (Gibney's enjoyably sober narrator) turned Thompson into a borderline clown for 1998's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; this documentary restores a fair measure of the intelligent (even feared) critic and author."

"Gonzo turns out to be the most absorbing film, fiction or nonfiction, I have seen this year," declares Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

Cathleen Rountree talks with Gibney for SF360.

Cheryl Eddy calls up Gibney for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Earlier: Reviews from Sundance and "Hunter S Thompson, 1939 - 2005."

Updates, 7/3: "A couple of passages aside, it is almost perversely straightforward in light of its unstable subject, a chronological march through the heavy 60s, the downer 70s and the post-Reagan blur with a dutiful assemblage of talking heads and archival footage," sighs Elbert Ventura at indieWIRE. "The historical and cultural insights are all textbook, the music choices Gump-esque (if I hear Jefferson Airplane playing over images of Summer of Love San Francisco one more time...). What saves the movie is the man himself."

"Overall, Gibney's film has the most fun as it focuses on the stories behind Thompson's early successes, including a clever recreation of moments from the actual Fear and Loathing road trip to Las Vegas with Mexican-American lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta (the Samoan 'Dr Gonzo' in the book) using actual audiotape from the trip recorded by Thompson," writes Bob Westal at Bullz-Eye. The film is "excessively loose and far from definitive - but the last thing Thompson would have wanted was the Ken Burns treatment."

"It's more Thompson-for-beginners than an exhaustive inquiry, but as introductions go, it's thorough and thoughtful," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club.

Aaron Hillis talks with Gibney for IFC; Sam Adams for the Philadelphia City Paper; Steven Boone for the SpoutBlog.

Update, 7/4: Phil Nugent begins another very fine entry with a look back at the beginnings of gonzo journalism:

Some innovators would have let this stuff into their work a dribble at a time, just to measure the effect and see how it was taking; Thompson dove in with both feet, and just to make sure that there was no misunderstanding about where his priorities were now, he wrapped up his report on the Kentucky Derby without bothering to mention anything about what had happened on the racetrack or who had won. (Thompson would later maintain that he had suffered paralyzing writers block, been unable to write the piece, and just sent in his notebook pages, and was wondering what he was going to do for a new career when word got to him that his editors at Scanlon's were bananas about what he'd sent and that he'd knocked one out of the park. It's a story I've always liked without knowing whether to believe; if it's true, Thompson, who could be a very sloppy, lazy writer, sure did keep a polished notebook. I sort of suspect that he wrote what he'd planned to write but did think that it might end his career if it didn't fly and came up with the writers block story in advance as a cover if things didn't go the way he hoped.)

"Thompson's creatively fallow years outnumbered his fertile ones, which can leave you feeling a bit deflated after two hours," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "But at his best he was braver, funnier and more ruthlessly honest than just about any other magazine writer, and Gonzo confirms his place in the great American parade of cranks, renegades and sages - that is, in the best, most disreputable corner of our literary pantheon."

"Gibney succeeds in dispelling Thompson's cartoonish persona, returning the focus to his writing and celebrating its force and moral clarity," writes JR Jones in the Chicago Reader. "And some of the people interviewed are admirably honest in observing how Thompson betrayed his talent and let down his readers. Yet Gonzo shies away from assessing Thompson's legacy in our modern media landscape, where a degraded gonzoism has only added to the cacophony."

"Gonzo emphasizes that, for all his cynical rant, Thompson began as a genuine idealist who saw bright promise in the counterculture revolution of the late 1960s but who soured into despair even as his fame spread and his fortune increased," writes Joe Leydon in the Houston Chronicle. "He lived long enough to devolve into a walking-and-talking (though just barely) caricature, one ironically upstaged by a cartoon caricature (in the Doonesbury comic strip). But his friends and admirers persuasively argue in Gibney's film that he should have stuck around to bring his gonzo fury to bear on contemporary figures fully deserving of fear and loathing."

"While the figure of Hunter S Thompson may already be an overly familiar cinematic subject, what is remarkable about Gonzo is the amount of archival footage that has been included from all stages of his life," notes Stephen Snart at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "It's a testament to Thompson's character that even back when film was a more precious commodity, people seemed to know that if Thompson was in a room it was worth the expense of turning on a camera."

"The great Hunter S Thompson documentary has yet to be made, but there's a respectable draft - including a blueprint on what not to do - in Gonzo." Paul Constant in the Stranger.

Andrew O'Hehir quotes from "among the most lucid and penetrating passages of Thompson's entire career," the September 12, 2001 column for ESPN, and then talks with Gibney for Salon.

"This seems to me a very sad story about an essentially minor figure," grumbles Richard Schickel in Time. "Thompson's was not a life to celebrate (and Gibney, to his credit, does not do so). But there is an implicit approval in this film that makes me uneasy. But then, irrationality always make me uneasy."

"[I]t leaves you wondering, how was it that so many people liked this man who does not seem to have liked himself? And what about the hangovers?" asks Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Nick Plowman: "Gibney pushes the envelope, going a little over the edge, and in a sense, it is as though Thompson's spirit was infused into this fascinating arc detailing Hunter when he still thought he was invincible and when he later realised that he was only human, albeit an unusual one."

Online listening tip. Gibney's a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Posted by dwhudson at July 2, 2008 8:37 AM