And it’s those details, the sublime experience of watching it, that makes it so special.ĭisc 1 - ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ And in typical ’60s fashion, there is no answer: it’s about the ride, not the destination.įear and Loathing in Las Vegas is so filled with delights, strangeness, and oddities that one can watch it a dozen times and still notice new things. The events of Fear and Loathing… are what happens when you go looking for some sort of answer in all that bullshit. Gilliam’s film has the same wandering looseness of films from the 1960s and 1970s like (1969) and Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), but it also has their rebellious nihilism that feeds off the understanding that everything fed to them is bullshit. If we can’t trust what Thompson is seeing, then how can we trust what he’s saying? America is a country founded on myths, legends and outright lies, and if this is the counter-cultural B Side of American history, perhaps it has just as many falsehoods. Thompson is the quintessential unreliable narrator, so out of his mind that he doesn’t even know whether he’s thinking things or saying them aloud. Maybe that’s unsurprising given Gilliam’s history with the medium on Monty Python. In fact, the pair’s dynamic and energy often resembles a live-action cartoon. With a potbelly poking out of his tiki shirt and his moustache lying dead across his top lip, Del Toro looks very much like a cartoon. He put on 40lbs for the role and grew out his hair. We’re never granted access to a fully sober Thompson, and one wonders what teetotal Thompson would resemble. And, more impressive still, he capitalises on Depp’s excellent grasp of physical comedy.ĭepp’s Thompson bleats, shouts, flaps and falls - in a slapstick performance which the film is all the better for capturing.
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Gilliam uses Depp’s chameleonic qualities to make him look less like a movie star and more like a tourist from Arizona. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas feels like a culmination of his work until that point, as well as a hint towards the large, mannered, inebriated performance that would define his career in the next decade.
Following Cry-Baby (1990), Ed Wood (1994), and Dead Man (1995), by the late-1990s Depp was proving to be an adaptable Hollywood star who worked extremely well with auteurs. And that’s not hard, as the film is incredibly funny.ĭepp and Del Toro play off each other like a modern-day Laurel & Hardy, each taking turns to be the straight man, neither ever fully achieving coherence. but with Gilliam’s anarchic spirit, we’re invited to laugh at the degeneracy. In different hands, audiences might be asked to show concern for these crazy characters…. His bucket hat is his helmet and cocaine his gunpowder. Popping the trunk of their car, Thompson rattles off his cache of stimulants like it’s artillery and they’re two soldiers heading into battle. It only has fuel, and that fuel is drugs and booze. It’s a road trip movie, essentially, but as the two men speed along desert roads in a beat-up convertible, it soon becomes clear this one has no destination besides the literal. Thankfully this makes the film less of a didactic sermon and more of a funhouse nightmare.
This approach claims an attitude of ‘I’ve been there so you don’t have to’, but in reality (if there is a reality to this story) their intentions feel murkier and less noble.
The story, slim though it is, follows Thompson (Johnny Depp) and Dr Gonzo (Benicio del Toro) on a drug-soaked binge through Las Vegas, in a vain attempt to take the country’s pulse and report their findings to milquetoast readers. If that sounds like a dark path to consider, Terry Gilliam’s film leavens any potential heaviness with absurdist comedy and deliriousness.