I HAVE SEEN the best minds of my generation being used as fodder for well-intentioned movies that didn’t quite make it. I wasn’t a co-generationist with Allen Ginsberg, mind; all we shared was a 30-second conversation in San Jose. He told me, re David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, “The movie didn’t ruin the book; the book is still on the shelf.” As Ginsberg could have predicted, Howl the movie hardly ruins Howl the poem. As directed by frequent documentary makers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, this is a film told in multiple methods, beginning with a re-creation of the poem’s first reading 55 years ago. Palo Alto’s own James Franco plays the poet. His air of wounded sincerity and heavyweight sensitivity, so overbearing in full-length roles, is just right in these episodes.
We see Franco’s Ginsberg in a cramped apartment, sometime in the early 1960s; the scene is an interview about the work and a life ringed with madness. These fictional interview scenes work well. They distill the poet’s conversation and sum up the events of his life, and it’s all low-key—unlike the usual scenes of a great man being grilled, forced to confront his paradoxes and demons. The sequences sum up the love affairs with Peter Orlovsky and Neal Cassady, as well as that passionate friendship with Jack Kerouac, which helped ease Kerouac out of the confines of his head and get him into a more physical kind of writing. Howl‘s weakest part is the animation that illustrates the poem itself. Eric Drooker’s design shows us towers of Expressionist cities giving way to heavenly visions and exalted genitalia. Moloch looks a giant Minotaur in this version. Interspersed with the animated poem and the Ginsberg interview are scenes of the 1957 obscenity trial of the published poem, People v. Ferlinghetti. It’s startlingly undramatic stuff, and not just because we know the outcome. Cable TV all-stars take up the scenes: Jon Hamm, in a beautifully cut suit, radiates humanity as the defense lawyer Jake Ehrlich. David Strathairn gives his best weaned-on-a-dill-pickle mannerisms as a book banner, and Mary-Louise Parker bungees in as a witness for the prosecution.
At its worst, Howl pats the audience on the back. It assures them they would have been advanced enough to know this was a classic being talked about as if it were common porn. Ultimately, one is grateful for Epstein and Friedman’s articulation of the poem. You can tell Howl the film will be doing duty as Cliffs Notes in literature classes for a time to come.
Unrated; 90 min.
Opens Friday
