The Rum Diary

This movie cost $45,000,000 to make.

Which is unforgivable.

It is a vanity project made at the behest of a movie star who has generated billions of dollars by making movies that are the exact opposite of The Rum Diary.

So why plug forty-five mil into a movie with an artsy title, an obscure source – at least among mainstream moviegoers -- and a nearly non-existent story?

Heck if I know. But someone got left holding the bag for their lack of judgment. (Editor’s note: It’s probably Graham King, the billionaire financier whose GK films produced the movie.) And it’s not Johnny Depp. His was an upfront payment.

The Rum Diary pulled in a measly five million dollars at the box office its opening weekend by following the wacky exploits of a low-level journalist in the 1950’s who moves to Puerto Rico to work for the newspaper there, and drinks a lot.

In one sense, there is a lot more to The Rum Diary than that.

There’s Aaron Eckhardt as a shady businessman who involves Depp in a plot to publicize a land development deal underwritten by corrupt politicians.

There’s Amber Heard, Eckhardt’s unbelievably beautiful girlfriend, who flirts with Depp, dances her way into danger with the locals, and then vanishes to start her life over again in New York City.

There’s Michael Rispoli and Giovanni Ribisi as Depp’s eccentric colleagues who help in the effort to publish a dramatic final edition of the failed newspaper by winning a series of cockfights, consulting a voodoo practitioner and enlisting the help of a group of disgruntled proto-Occupy Wall Street types.

Yep, there sure is a lot going on in The Rum Diary.

But in another sense, absolutely nothing happens in The Rum Diary, since none of these characters, subplots or sidebars go anywhere at all.

That land deal? It comes off just fine, but without Depp’s participation, since he flakes out, as much from laziness and drunkenness as any moral objection.

The relationship with Heard? Transitory and pointless. Neither character is changed in the slightest by their interaction. She would have gone off to New York with or without his influence, and he would have sat around drinking with or without hers. (It’s interesting how Depp has never shown romantic chemistry with a female lead, even if he’s working with the sexiest actress in the world, like he was with Jolie in The Tourist. Depp has an almost entirely asexual onscreen presence. I think it drains a lot of tension out of his performances.)

And that final edition of the failed newspaper? It never gets printed. It seems the bad guys took the sensible precaution of removing vital pieces of the printing presses when they closed down the paper. So that’s the end of that.

Overall, The Rum Diary suffers badly from the fact that it derives from a work of non-fiction. After all, the non-fictional world we inhabit tends to play out in meaningless, anti-climactic ways. In that sense, there is honesty and accuracy in The Rum Diary, but little drama and less revelation. It’s just a bunch of slightly odd stuff that happens.

No Country for Old Men featured a similarly anti-climactic finale, but that deviation from standard screenwriting practice was, in my opinion, a dramatic masterstroke. No Country built so relentlessly toward the inevitable showdown between Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin that, when it didn’t happen, it left us reeling. For days I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that Josh Brolin’s character died off-screen, and at the hands of someone other than Javier Bardem. And that’s what an artist can do: make you think, and struggle, and shake your head as you try to comprehend the world through the prism of a film.

By contrast, the lack of a satisfying resolution in The Rum Diary left me mildly annoyed. The whole movie rambled to no effect, so I wasn’t much surprised when it ended that way too.

The book version of The Rum Diary is presumably a worthwhile read because of the strength of Hunter S. Thompson’s prose. But of course, prose does not appear in a movie unless the voice-over technique is mercilessly abused, so I remain confused as to why this film was ever made at all.

Beyond the fact that Johnny Depp wanted it to be made.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 27/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 18/100