The Rum Diary (2011)

On November 14, 2011 · Leave a Comment · In Film Review

Journalism, corruption, booze, what else do you need?

Director Bruce Robinson

Stars Johnny Depp, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Rispoli, Giovanni Ribisi, Amber Heard

Things You Might Like

The gorgeous scenery
Depp’s never-disappointing acting
Moberg
Eckhart’s smarminess
The Message

Things You Might Not Like

Not at all how it’s marketed
Drags a bit in the think-y bits
Puerto Ricans get lost in the backdrop of Sanderson v. Kemp

Conclusion
The Rum Diary, while not technically a prequel, gives a fantastic prelude to Fear and Loathing and yet more reasons to hate corruption.

5 out of 5 Giant Roosters

Aaron Simon

***

I should probably start this off by saying that I walked out of The Rum Diary by saying to my much less enthusiastic friend, “Yeah! Damn the Bastards! Dude, which guy were you? You were Bob Fucking Sala, that’s who you are, and your tongue is an accusatory giblet!”

I’ll be trying my damndest to not make my review consist entirely of that.

Anyway.

The Rum Diary is based off of Hunter S. Thompson’s book of the same name and is directed by Bruce Robinson. You can kind of think of it like a prequel to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, evidenced by the final title card in the film, which reads: This is the end of one story, and the beginning of another.

The film follows Paul Kemp—played by Johnny Demp, and Hunter S. Thompson’s stand-in—as he arrives in Puerto Rico to interview for a journalist position at the flailing and near-broke San Juan Star. He arrives, gets very, very drunk, and wakes the next morning with a horribly bloodshot eye, which is when we meet him.

Kemp takes a cab to the newspaper’s office, where he has to dodge a crowd of very angry protestors beset by very violent cops. He interviews with Lotterman (Richard Jenkins), the editor of the paper, and one of those types who’s become jaded and cynical with his position, but has too much invested to quit. He’s hired shortly after and is taken on a tour of the offices where he meets, among others, Bob Sala (Michael Rispoli) and the deranged man known as Moberg (Giovanni Ribisi).

As he settles into his first day, he meets Hal Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart), a man who’s introduced as a “P.R. guy and freelancer.” He immediately stands out from the crowd of drinkers and, er, rogues that make up the paper as a man who is the epitome of 50s class.

These first few scenes are very well done in terms of establishing characters and theme. One line in particular was very well-delivered and reacted-to (give me a break, I’m used to literary terms, here). Kemp asks what happened to his predecessor and is told “He was raped to death.”

“Raped to death?” Kemp asks.

“He died in a cubicle,” says Lotterman, trying to assuage Kemp’s fears.

“He went to a bar near the ports,” Sala says. “Never go down there when the sailors are on shore leave.”

After those initial scenes, Kemp moves in with Sala and learns, among other things, about Moberg’s predilection for listening to Hitler’s speeches and stealing filters from rum distilleries.

After, Kemp meets Sanderson’s girlfriend, Chenault (Amber Heard), and thus opens up a handy-dandy love triangle.

Next on the plate is the unraveling of—shock, amazement—corruption that has been handily hinted at earlier in the film by both Sala and Lotterman. Kemp gets involved, and thus leads the plot into breaking-and-entering, Caribbean blues, hallucinogens, and Puerto Ricans “out for revenge against the white man.”

Well, in terms of how the movie was shot, I’ve got no complaints. It wasn’t anything spectacular, but you know that Robinson knows what he’s doing right from the onset. The pace is, by and large, very well-executed—though some of the more think-y bits drag the film for a moment or two.

Acting-wise, Depp delivers—as usual—and, as we saw in Thank You For Smoking, Eckhart plays immoral businessmen nearly flawlessly. Rispoli’s Sala and his cynical, laid-back demeanor is a fantastic counter to Kemp’s often-too-neat-for-Puerto-Rico dress, and provides a fine middle ground between Depp’s struggling writer and Robisi’s given-over-to-hedonism Moberg. (Side note: The film’s worth seeing for Moberg alone. There’s nothing like a romance scene being ground to a halt by the screeching of Adolf Hitler.)

The sole scene of drug use is sprinkled with extremely memorable CGI and the best line in the movie: “Your tongue is like an accusatory giblet.”

But the real star of the film is Kemp’s character arc and the catalysts for the change from an unimpressive journalist writing about tourists swarming the hotels of the island (referred to as “great white sharks”) to a man who writes that, from this particular moment onwards, he will deliver the truth in “rage and ink.”

The aforementioned catalysts are, obviously, corruption as embodied by Sanderson—but there’s more to it than that. In one scene, as Sala and Kemp watch a neighbor’s TV tuned to a Nixon-Kennedy debate from across an alleyway, Kemp remarks that the most disgusting thing about seeing it is the knowledge that “some day, someone will come along and make [Nixon] look like a liberal.”

It was at that point that the bells went off in my head and I almost shouted out “HA! Topical!” But in a good way. Not in a facetious, I-want-to-bludgeon-myself-so-the-Statement-doesn’t-have-to way.

See, it’s that very thing that really weaves the point of the film into the point of Fear and Loathing. As The Rum Diary progresses, we understand that, all along, we’ve been listening to people say that Puerto Rico is the American Dream. That the whole point of the island, and it being a part of the United States, is to give—to paraphrase Lotterman—some schlub from the Midwest the chance to come down to paradise, bowl, and then go back home.

As Kemp realizes, there are two groups of people that he meets; the people who look at the wealth at the expense of the native Puerto Ricans and decide that, fuck em, that’s the dream, and those who look at the exploitation and want to—but can’t—change the way the island operates. And around it all, the people who make it go, are the tourists. Kemp’s “great white sharks,” represented by heavily obese, white Americans who refuse to go outside the comfort of their hotels.

Kemp sees it as a perversion of the dream, and as a sign of what’s wrong with the country as a whole—and the film does everything it can to make the viewer see it like that too.

But if that were the extent of the film, then it would be poor, indeed. The way the film frames the narrative is through Kemp’s struggle to find his voice as a writer. We’re told that he’s a man who’s written two novels but can’t get read. That he views himself as a phony because he can’t write like himself.

Well, it turns out that Kemp finds his voice, and all it took was being in direct conflict with some very powerful people, seeing the extreme poverty and horrible conditions of locals, and almost getting killed because he was a Yankee in Puerto Rico, and thus a man responsible for the hotels, the exploitation, and the unanswered deaths of Puerto Ricans so white Americans could benefit.

It’s almost like a light turning on, but in one scene, we see Kemp get a sort of enlightenment—with the aid of hallucinogens provided by Moberg. The morning after tripping, he sits down at the typewriter and pledges to his future readers that he’ll be the voice of the voiceless (essentially), calling out “the Bastards” for their excesses and crimes, in a flurry of ink and rage.

And it’s that sentiment that makes this film exceedingly relevant—not just for the moment, but for all times. (Frankly, it’s what makes people like Thompson so important, but that’s for a discussion of the book.) It’s Kemp’s “Bastards” who people are angry at all across the world. They are the people who have gotten rich by raping the resources of countries, who have profited from exceedingly questionable business practices.

The problem, as Kemp so rightly realizes in one scene, is that “the Bastards” are very powerful and are very cognizant of when their authority is being challenged. In one of the final scenes, as Kemp, Sala, and Moberg stand in the ruins of a plan gone awry, Sala and Moberg are resigned but Kemp has a victorious grin on his face.

Sala asks why.

You smell that? Kemp asks. It’s the smell of Bastards. It’s the smell of Truth.

Here’s the trailer: