the promotion for fear and loathing in las vegas ? has made the film out to be a comedy , and for about the first hour or so it seems like it might be one .
it’s 1971 , and the hippie movement has left behind quite a few wash-outs , among them journalist raoul duke ( johnny depp ) and his ” attorney ” dr . gonzo ( benito del toro ) .
these two spend most of the film in a drug-induced stupor , having strange hallucinations , trashing their hotel rooms , and either annoying or scaring almost everyone that crosses their path .
duke is first assigned to cover an outdoor desert motorcycle race in las vegas , but gets lost in a blur of drugs , beer , and flying dust , and ends up wandering around with no clue who won .
he leaves vegas briefly before he is sent back , in what can only be described as a strangely appropriate twist of fate , to cover a drug enforcement conference .
fear and loathing has been misinterpreted by some as glorifying the use of drugs .
it doesn’t , even in the beginning–while the pair’s antics are sometimes amusing and relatively harmless at first , the humor here is still fairly dark .
director terry gilliam views them with a rather satirical eye , and even when we’re laughing , we’re laughing at them rather than with them .
they spend most of their time paranoid , angry , or just plain befuddled , which is probably an understandable reaction to seeing the entire room suddenly fill up with giant reptiles .
the black comedy may be entertaining to watch onscreen , but it’s probably not something most other audience members would want to experience first-hand .
all this aside , i was starting to grow a bit restless as the film drew near its one-hour mark , thinking to myself that i wanted something more out of this than just an off-kilter satire of drug culture .
thankfully , the script delivers it before too long , as duke , in a rare moment of lucidity , stops to recall how he was once an enthusiastic hippie , ” riding the wave ” of something that seemed special and important .
now it’s six years later and the wave has finally broken , as he puts it .
materialistic culture is still alive and well and , for most of this film , right in his face in las vegas ; the ” american dream ” of which duke occasionally speaks is still just as shallow and phony as ever .
the social protesters have lost , and the more questionable aspects of the movement have turned ugly and left casualties such as duke to drift in a sea of drugs and disillusionment .
in many ways , fear and loathing is gilliam’s most reality-based film ; all of his others , with the exception of the fisher king , have made use of some sort of fantasy or science-fiction plot elements .
yet it is his off-the-wall masterpiece brazil ? to which this film bears the most visual resemblance .
the protagonist of brazil found himself alternately surrounded by a plastic , soulless society and the constant chaos of totalitarian police inspections and terrorist attacks , and similarly duke’s world is composed of the artificial , empty glam of las vegas and the bizarre anarchy of his drug hallucinations .
unlike the protagonist of brazil , however , duke is not a particularly admirable figure , and neither is gonzo .
during the latter half of the film , their trips turn nastier and the consequences worse , eventually building up to an incident an a diner in which gonzo crudely frightens and humiliates a waitress , while duke , though he doesn’t seem to approve , doesn’t do anything to stop it either .
by the time this scene takes place , they don’t seem like hippies or peaceniks or protesters or anything of the sort any more ; they just seem like a couple of stoned jerks in a diner .
duke seems to realize at some level that he’s become something he doesn’t like , but he’s either too apathetic or too defeated to do anything to change .
this film has taken a critical drubbing from many who view it as an essentially pointless film that simply throws one trip scene after another at the audience .
while gilliam may have overdone it in a few places , i think he and his co-writers deserve more credit than that .
there’s plenty of substance here , particularly in the second half ; its observations about the broken and defeated rebels from the ’60s and the objects of their rebellion just aren’t usually very pleasant .
unlike , say , brazil ? or the fisher king , both of which feature a character who dares to let himself dream in a repressive environment , fear and loathing in las vegas ? shows us someone who’s given up on his dreams and resorts to the quick fix of drugs .
in its own psychedelic , whacked-out way , it’s sad and regretful , but i think it’s also a bit of a kick in the pants , a challenge to find an alternative between chemically-induced withdrawal and the equally addictive drug of vegas-style materialism .
indeed , duke himself admits at one point that he’s never learned to accept that you can get higher without drugs than with them .
i’m not sure if he’s any closer to accepting it by the end or not , but i suspect the audience will get the idea .