I’ve seen the entertainers of my generation, inebriated, intoxicated, plastered on multiple magazine covers, who sweat illicit substance; who marry for publicity; who annul to marry again; who sell “stolen” sextapes; who philanthropically adopt numerous children; who switch sexuality bi-weekly; who slander the system; who embrace the freedoms of capitalism; who flash the peace sign in subtlety; who shatter subtlety with a sledgehammer; who rouse the masses with crudity; who expose indifference and hypocrisy; who illuminate a subculture screaming to be heard.
Perhaps we have become a celebrity-obsessed culture, more desensitized with every incarnation of Grand Theft Auto, reality show, or tabloid magazine we encounter, eliding the moments that threatened to impede our inalienable rights to speak freely, content that censorship is rooted in conspiracy and has gone the way of the Dodo, forgetting about the short, bearded Jewish poet from New Jersey who wrote a poem that ultimately set new ground rules for censorship, opening doors for the publishing of other works like Naked Lunch, Tropic of Cancer, and Lolita.
Allen Ginsberg penned Howl and Other Poems in 1956, openly criticizing the epidemical hypocrisy in America and the refusal to acknowledge homosexuality as anything other than deviant behavior, for which the “sufferer” was deemed a “psychopath.” Ginsberg himself spent eight months in a mental institution, but was released when he promised his psychoanalyst that he would be a heterosexual, which categorized him as “perfectly right.”
Howl, the poem is still often derided as obscene and vulgar, and there are certainly words that might evoke this if taken out of context, but Howl, the 2011 movie, does a fine job framing Ginsberg’s poem into a social context for the current generation, one that has been removed from obvious censorship, allowed to be swayed by a wealth of pundits and channels that provide, as George Will asserts in “Reality Television: Oxymoron,” “the illusion of choice.”
{Editor rushes over and yanks soap box out from underneath}
For the purposes of full disclosure, I am a rather large fan of Ginsberg and the Beat Generation, so saying anything less than “I love the movie” would be a lie; however, I realize that I am clearly biased, and my familiarity with the Beat Generation will hardly sway you to run out and view the film.
Instead, I’ll offer this: the film utilizes two elements that add a wealth of validity to this production and differentiates it from any potential biopic that might have transpired. First, the screenplay is taken directly from three genuine transcriptions: one from the trial in which Lawrence Ferlinghetti is charged with obscenity for selling copies of Howl and Other Poems, another from a tape-recorded interview given by Ginsberg, and a live reading of Howl, fully equipped with hollers, gripes, groans, and cheers.
Regarding the trial portion of the movie, the filmmaker’s choice to use the actual transcript, which can also be found in the book Howl on Trial, prevents the film from becoming a stylized Law and Order episode that finds Sam Waterson speculating and leading every witness to ensure dramatic integrity while obviated legal procedure. Instead, the moments of semantic confusion and convolution, particularly where the definition of literature is involved, are genuine and comical in their inanity.
Likewise, Ginsberg’s interview sheds light on the passion and the frightened self-exploration that impels Howl, establishing that he wasn’t an anarchist looking to “piss off the system,” but rather, to start a discourse on the existence of homosexuality as well as the apprehensions and fears that came along with coming out in a society where Time Magazine was publishing articles that indict parents’ “constant bickering,” and “divorce or separation” as the cause of this “disease” (Source)
What makes these scenes more enthralling is James Franco’s performance, one that might define his acting range. Not only does Franco don the beard and pad himself with slight weight – or prosthetics – to embody the stocky figure of Ginsberg, but his intonation and inflection are impressively accurate. Ginsberg has a way of speaking that quick and eloquent with a philosopher’s non-sequitorial choppiness; Franco captures this, keeping the viewer focused on the poet’s words, not the actor.
Unfortunately, the moments in which Franco surfaces from this immersion are when he reads Howl in a café, and while the words are powerful, his delivery suffers slightly, resembling more a Woody Allen impression…but in the end, this is a venial sin because the poetry carries the scene and is interspersed with Eric Drooker’s animation, harnessing you on a visual roller coaster from the surreal to the visceral and the comically mordant.
As a film, there is no twist. Ginsberg is still homosexual, and you can find Howl in every library. Everything has already been written. It’s not a dramatic biopic. Ginsberg died happily in 1997. Cinematically, Howl is not thrilling. There are no explosions; instead, the content of the film reminds us how precarious our freedoms have been, can be, and often are. And, the same might be said for our open-mindedness if we listen to certain antiquated rhetoric spouting zealots.
DYL MAG Score: 7
