Noteworthy for what must be the least psychedelic acid-trip scene ever filmed, The Rum Diary struggles to seem both authentic and outrageous. The movie is Johnny Depp’s latest tribute to his friend and inspiration, journalist Hunter S. Thompson, and should interest members of either man’s cult. Everyone else will be wondering how “gonzo” could be so humdrum.
Depp has been boosting this property a long time. He discovered Thompson’s 1961 novel, then unpublished, while hanging with the writer in preparation for playing him in 1998’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The actor helped get the book a publisher, and more than a decade later persuaded retired writer-director Bruce Robinson to adapt it into this film.
Robinson made the alcohol-soaked Withnail & I, a 1987 cult film that — like Thompson’s novel — is semi-autobiographical. He seems a logical choice to direct The Rum Diary, and he hasn’t done a bad job. But Thompson’s blend of self-indulgence and self-righteousness is hard to transfer from page to screen, and Depp’s low-key Thompson impression is emblematic of a movie that too often underplays the absurdities that might enliven it.
Thompson’s on-screen alter ego is Paul Kemp, who arrives in Puerto Rico from New York to take a job at a struggling English-language newspaper. He’s stinking drunk before he ever meets his new boss, Lotterman (Richard Jenkins), and is soon living with a photographer (Michael Rispoli) whose passions are boozing and cockfighting. Their occasional third roommate (Giovanni Ribisi) is the tale’s wildest caricature: a dissolute Hitler fan who trades in “470 proof” alcohol and a new drug so mind-blowing, he says, that the FBI is “giving it to Communists.”
Initially, Kemp has no ambition and few principles. He identifies himself to Lotterman as a politically “in the middle,” although there’s nothing moderate about the comments he makes as he watches his future nemesis, Richard Nixon, debate JFK on TV.