The atmosphere is amplified further by the odd ugly detail, such as several cockfights that look too real for comfort, and the occasional line that rings with perfect irony: "Imagine what it must be like," Kemp says, "to be an alcoholic." The sense is enhanced by the performance of Michael Rispoli as Kemp's friend, who gives us a man who's competent and appealing but has the aura of someone who has been dumped out of a car. Behind the humor, there's a sense of despair, of being lost and living in some outpost at the edge of the country. People who enjoy "The Rum Diary" will respond to its world.
It's just brutal to cast her as a woman able to dazzle two mature, intelligent men, when she is at least a half-dozen years away from that even being possible. At 48, Depp is an undiminished romantic lead, but at 25 and looking more like 20, Heard is too young for him. Needless to say there's a woman involved, too - a damsel in a tower in need of rescue - who happens to be living with the shady Sanderson.Īmber Heard plays the woman of our hero's dreams, though the first time you see her with Depp you might, for a second, think he's just taking a fatherly interest. A burgeoning alcoholic, he falls in with his fellow drunks but also gets swept into the circle of a glib and glamorous businessman, Sanderson, played by Aaron Eckhart. Here and there, fleetingly, it is.ĭepp, who goes through the movie doing a not-so-subtle impersonation of Thompson, plays Kemp, a journalist who takes a job at the San Juan Star. Still, by the time the truth dawns about "The Rum Diary," the movie has built up too much audience goodwill for it to become an object of scorn. Instead, he keeps short-circuiting his imagination and retreating to the familiar - to people sitting around getting drunk or stoned and making rote pronouncements about the soul of America. (It wasn't published until 1998.) As a storyteller, Thompson seems unable to let go and let his story and his characters take him to places where he doesn't feel safe. That publishers rejected it won't be a mystery to anyone who sees this movie. Thompson wrote "The Rum Diary" as a young man in the early 1960s, loosely based on his own experience writing for a sports publication in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
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