Review: The Rum Diary

In The Rum Diary, Johnny Depp plays a much more serious, earnest Hunter. S. Thompson stand-in than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas -- or the late Thompson himself, for that matter -- would have us expect. He's a journalist working for a struggling English-language daily in Puerto Rico, but "gonzo" is not yet part of his vocabulary. Director Bruce Robinson adequately captures the stranger-in-a-strange-land mood in the early scenes, but fails to push it to its hallucinatory limits.

Starring: Johnny Depp, Giovanni Ribisi and Aaron Eckhart

Rating: Three stars out of five

Johnny Depp is aging backwards. The last time we saw his Hunter S. Thompson-esque character, he was roaring through the Nevada desert on a beer- and mescaline-fuelled frenzy in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Terry Gilliam made that film in 1998 and set it in 1971, which put both Depp and Thompson smack in their mid-30s. But The Rum Diary takes place a decade earlier. Depp is now 48, trying to pass for 25, and wearing it as easily as a badger in a trench coat.

He's also a much more serious, earnest Thompson stand-in than Fear and Loathing -- or the late Thompson himself, for that matter -- would have us expect. He's a journalist working for a struggling English-language daily in Puerto Rico, but "gonzo" is not yet part of his vocabulary.

There are hints of the mayhem to come in Depp's mostly even-keeled performance, however. He places his alcohol consumption at the "upper end of social," which doesn't sound too bad, until you realize the society he keeps.

Most of the staffers at the Daily News have been there so long that corruption has become a way of life, and sloth a coping mechanism. "Like an England with tropical fruit" is how the world-weary editor (Richard Jenkins) world-wearily describes America's Caribbean territory. He also tosses out "the land of multiple outrages."

A shady developer named Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart) has a different tak! e on the island: "God's idea of money." He's hit upon the idea of building a chain of luxury resorts on one of the region's last stretches of virgin beachfront property, and he hits on the innocent Paul Kemp (Depp) as a potential mouthpiece. He wants Kemp to draft press releases and craft travel articles to convince the world it needs one more oceanfront hotel. Maybe even more than one.

Kemp is an oddly soft-spoken protagonist in the early going. He tags along with Daily News photographer Bob Sala (Michael Rispoli) and Moburg, the burnt-out crime-and-religious-affairs reporter, played by a raspy, limping Giovanni Ribisi as a kind of proto-Thompson figure. Moburg introduces Kemp to his first hard drugs -- a full 90 minutes into the picture! -- which leads to the movie's best line: "Your tongue is like an accusatory giblet!"

Moments like this remind us that The Rum Diary was adapted and directed by Bruce Robinson (Withnail & I), dragged out of filmmaking retirement -- and, during filming, knocked off the wagon -- by longtime fan, Depp.

Robinson adequately captures the stranger-in-a-strange-land mood in the early scenes, but fails to push it to its hallucinatory limits. One gets the sense that he's tiptoeing around the material, lest he set Thompson spinning in his grave. (At least that's all he can do. Gilliam once told me that Fear and Loathing was his most fraught adaptation, because "Hunter had a gun.")

The Rum Diary is very much Depp's baby, however. He came upon the unpublished source novel while researching his role in Fear and Loathing, and convinced Thompson to publish it. The movie version has been in development since the turn of the century, when the actor might have stood a better change of pulling off the character's youthful innocence.

Depp still does a good job -- he's still Johnny Depp, after all -- even when wooing the half-his-age Amber Heard, who plays Chenault, Sanderson's opportunistic girlfriend. Kemp is also seen reading The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and ! complain s: "I don't know how to write like me." Clearly, Coleridge would prove to be a gateway author for Kemp/Thompson, who would go on to write more like himself than anyone before or since.

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