Hunter S. Thompson | Through the Shattered Lens

The year is 1970 and big business has all the power in Aspen, Colorado. The landscape is being bulldozed to make room for time-shares. The once pristine ground is being covered in asphalt. The rich are using Aspen as their own personal playground while the hippies, drawn to the town by the beautiful landscape, are regularly used as scapegoats for every problem that the town encounters.

A struggling journalist named Hunter S. Thompson (Jay Bulger) wants to change that. When Thompson first declares that he will be running a third party, “freak power” campaign for Sheriff of Pitkin County, his main concern is getting paid to write about it and perhaps becoming a regular contributor to Rolling Stone Magazine. But, as the campaign starts to grow and Thompson finds success in motivating the hippies to actually register to vote, he starts to realize that he could actually win this thing. Despite the efforts of Aspen’s mayor (Cheryl Hines, the stepmother of the film’s director), “freak power” is on the verge of turning the establishment upside down.

Fear and Loathing in Aspen is based on the true story of Thompson’s campaign. Thompson did not win but he did go on to write Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and to cover the 1972 presidential election for Rolling Stone. Thompson was an iconoclast, a writer who as open about his love for drugs as he was for his love of guns. He committed suicide in 2005. If he were still with us, one imagines that he would probably love Bernie while hating Trump, Biden, and Twitter. There have been a few, generally uneven attempts to bring Thompson and his writing to cinematic life, the most famous probably being Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, starring Johnny Depp as Thompson.

Fear and Loathing Aspen stars Jay Bulger as Thompson and it should be said that Bulger does a good job in the role. While he doesn’t quite have the movie star charisma of Johnny Depp, he is believable as a sincere prankster, as someone who is genuinely torn between whether or not to burn it all down or to try to make people’s lives better by participating in the system. Unfortunately, the rest of the film doesn’t really rise up to the level of Bulger’s performance. Cheryl Hines, Laird Macinstosh, and Paul Morgan all give such cartoonishly evil performances as Thompson’s political opponents that it makes Steve Carell’s performance as Donald Rumsfeld in Vice look nuanced and intelligent by comparison. The film’s director tends to rely a bit too much on obvious tricks, like split screens and shaky hand-held footage. It gets distracting.

The director, by the way, is Bobby Kennedy III, the son of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. There’s some irony to be found in a film about outsiders being directed by a member of the Kennedy family, particularly the son of someone who would probably just be another Facebook conspiracy troll if not for the circumstances of his birth. Fear and Loathing in Aspen may tell the story of an outsiders revolt but it doesn’t feel authentic. With the exception of a few scenes, it feels like counterculture cosplay.

where_the_buffalo_roam_ver3 At his Colorado ranch, journalist Hunter S. Thompson (Bill Murray) is up against a deadline. He has to finish his story about his friendship with the radical lawyer and activist, Carlo Lazlo (Peter Boyle). Thompson flashes back to the time that he covered a trial in which Lazlo defended a group of young men charged with possession of marijuana. When the men are sent to prison, Lazlo snaps and physically attacks the prosecutor. Later, Lazlo resurfaces during the Super Bowl and tries to convince Thompson to join him in fighting a revolution in Latin America. And finally, in 1972, Lazlo tracks Thompson down while Thompson is traveling with the Nixon campaign.

Bill Murray as the legendary gonzo journalist, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson?

It sounds like a great idea, it’s just too bad that the movie’s not any good. Where The Buffalo Roam may be based on three of Thompson’s best known articles but it never feels gonzo. It never comes close to capturing Thompson’s anarchistic spirit. The real Thompson did drugs by the handful, was fascinated by guns, and always seemed to be on the verge of plunging into the abyss. Where The Buffalo Roam’s Thompson is a mild prankster and an ironically detached hipster, the type who the real Dr. Thompson probably would have kicked out of a moving car. As for Carlo Lazlo, the character is based on Oscar Zeta Acosta, the infamous “Samoan attorney” that Thompson renamed “Dr. Gonzo” in Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. The movie never figures out what to do with the character or Peter Boyle.

While preparing for the role, Bill Murray spent months hanging out with Thompson and, according to the book, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live by Doug Weingard and Jeff Hill, literally became Hunter Thompson for not only the duration of the filming but for several months afterward:

“In a classic case of the role overtaking the actor, Billy returned that fall to Saturday Night so immersed in playing Hunter Thompson he had virtually become Hunter Thompson, complete with long black cigarette holder, dark glasses, and nasty habits. ‘Billy,’ said one of the writers, echoing several others, ‘was not Bill Murray, he was Hunter Thompson. You couldn’t talk to him without talking to Hunter Thompson.'”

Neither Thompson nor Bill Murray were happy with Where The Buffalo Roam‘s neutered version of gonzo and the film is really for Murray completists only. The closest that Hollywood had gotten to getting Thompson right remains Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.