“Gonzo” celebrates life of Hunter S. Thompson

By Michael Sewall
March 1, 2008

Hunter S. Thompson spent most of the second half of his career writing about the death of the American Dream, but he was never able to pinpoint the exact time and place the dream died.

But with one gruesome blow to his head in February 2005, Thompson ended his life and set up a true tale of the death of the American Dream. Alex Gibney’s “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson” tells the story Hunter always wanted.

It seemed that as went Hunter, so did the American Dream. “Gonzo” sets out to prove his death — the death of an American icon and symbol of the American Dream — was where that dream finally died, where the wave finally rolled back.

But this documentary doesn’t quite portray that message of a dying dream in such a dreary way; rather, it celebrates Thompson’s life. It’s almost a full-blown, live-action funeral, with countless friends, family and co-workers delivering their final eulogies for Hunter. Interestingly enough, Gibney includes live footage of Thompson’s extravagant funeral, which featured a gigantic structure of the Gonzo fist that shot Thompson’s ashes into the air amid fireworks and naked blow-up dolls donning Richard Nixon masks. This footage is widely unseen, but it ends the documentary, further cementing this film’s role as a video funeral.

The rest of the film focuses on major events in Thompson’s life, beginning with his childhood in Louisville, Kent., and ending with the funeral. In between, Gibney focuses mostly on books Thompson wrote and, along with a collection of interviews and a delightful soundtrack, paints him in a social context. Gibney looks at “Hell’s Angels,” “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail: ‘72” as Thompson’s crowning achievements and uses those works to discuss his inundation into the culture of the Sixties, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, his serious campaign for sheriff of Aspen, Colo., his life as a political writer and, finally, his ultimate deterioration because of drugs.

Although Gibney looks at some areas more than others and doesn’t even attempt to delve into the nearly impossible psychoanalysis of Thompson, it’s OK; the tendency in a funeral is to focus on the “good times.”

The film portrays Thompson as everything he was, though: funny, brutal, vicious, insane, intense, intelligent, sick, weird, drugged, idealist and Gonzo. Through reading Hunter’s work, people can obtain a much better grasp of the person he was. This documentary simply celebrates his life, but it also does something Hunter himself never could: write the final chapter to the death of the American Dream, his own death—one in the same.

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