Gonzo : The Rise and Fall of Hunter S. Thompson
March 2, 2008 at 10:07 a.m.
The “Q” line stretched down the alley next to the Blue Note as I (and a few hundred of my closest friends) waited for a chance at an extra ticket to see Gonzo. The film documents the life and career of Hunter S. Thompson, a man Paul Sturtz, co-founder of the True/False, would say “could well be the patron saint of this festival.”
The show started with director Alex Gibney being presented with the True Vision award. Sturtz told Gibney that the festival was thrilled to be his first stop after winning an Academy Award for his other film Taxi to the Dark Side. Gibney responded by saying that True/False wasn’t his first stop. Rather “that event in Hollywood was just a warm up for this festival.”
Gibney was able to get remarkable interviews with figures who knew Thompson personally such as Pat Buchanan, Jimmy Carter, George McGovern, Ralph Steadman and members of Thompson’s family. Even subjects like Buchanan, who said "Thompson once described me as a half-crazed Davy Crockett," shared a respect for the rock star writer's immutable personality.
One of the most crowd-pleasing segments of the film chronicled Thompson’s run for sheriff of Aspen, CO where he received the endorsement of his neighbor and landlord who told cameras “Hunter is the man who never paid his rent, broke up my marriage and taught my children to smoke dope… but better him than Whitmire.”
During the film’s focus on Thompson’s work as a political correspondent, Gibney used a series of stock images to strike a parallelism between the landscape of Vietnam and Iraq era politics. 1972 Democratic candidate for president and subject of Thompson’s political support, George McGovern’s words on Vietnam and war in general drew applause from the audience three times.
Gibney paints Thompson as a tragic figure who flirted with madness and his own mortality on a daily basis, but who was nevertheless a patriot, idealist and “moralist disguised as an immoralist.” The latter stages of the documentary show Thompson trapped by his own fame and expectations. Thompson confesses in a stock interview that when he is invited to speak at colleges he is unsure if they want Thompson or Raul Duke, his strung out unpredictable alternate personality.
In the question and answer after the film, Gibney stated that Thompson is imitated but he believes the message of Thompson’s life is in the way he found his authentic voice to express himself and that is something he hoped people would take away from the documentary.
-Ricky O'Bannon
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