Review: Howl
I think I was about 16 years of age when I learnt that “Ginsberg’’ and “Kerouac’’ were cool names to drop. A few years later, as I headed to the Nova screening of Howl, the new film about Allen Ginsberg’s most celebrated work, I wondered why the film was here under such limited release (showing only at Nova cinema). I was thinking – in this current climate of Penguin Classic Tote bags – that lit culture surely still had selling power. Indeed, in its 53rd printing, the poem “Howl” is still City Lights Publisher’s best seller. But I arrived, and my (9pm Thursday) screening had 5 patrons present. And there I had been thinking my proud generation paid good money for Beatnik culture!
I suppose Howl took a financial risk in avoiding the conventional biopic genre. Howl is instead an enactment of Ginsberg’s poem. To focus on artistic product – and not artist – is one of the many choices made by directors/writers/producers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman that dignify this low-budget, intimate flick. With the poem as its core subject matter, the film weaves between four events/times/places surrounding it:
- (James Franco re-enacting) Ginsberg first reading his poem to his Beatnik buddies in a San Fran art gallery in 1955;
- Disney-like animations of the poem by Eric Drooker;
- A re-enactment of the 1957 famous court case as HOWL’s the publisher of “Howl” – where Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Publishing House – was faced with charges of obscenity;
- (James Franco as) Ginsberg being interviewed in his apartment during the 1957 court case.
On the one hand, the film recognizes our clichéd notions of the ‘Beats’. James Franco is a sexy Ginsberg in a perfect hipster world, presenting his poem for the first time to his bespectacled, chain-smoking (also suspiciously fresh fresh-faced) comrades. On the other hand, the camera refuses to linger in this downtown gallery. Denying us such brute groovy performances, the film explodes into silly and psychedelic animation, reminding me of the fun and jazz of Disney’s Fantasia.
Various friends and reviewers seem to have largely found these animations annoying. Complaints include that to visualise Ginsberg’s poetry is to literalize it, or that the animations are wanky glorifications of Beatnik drug trips. I recall the first time I listened to live recordings of Kerouac’s poetry performances. I was struck by the discrepancy between the image I had of a brooding cult icon, and the playful, teasing voice reading his poetry aloud. As serious as the beats were about their politics, I presume they played with poetry as the flexible medium it is, just as Shakespeare did with his witty sonnets.
In denying that Ginsberg’s word is gospel, Epstein and Friedman imbue the film with a playful performativity, that is in fact faithful to its adapted source. The film has fun with Ginsberg’s words, as well as revising his immortalised cult status. As Franco convincingly reads personal admissions from original interview footage, his Ginsberg comes closer to us, and the distance of the cult icon slowly diminishes. Ginsberg speaks of the major friendships and loves in his life, and we hear of his experience as a homosexual in conservative post-war America, but the film doesn’t dwell on the culturally specific politics of this. We instead hear from a Ginsberg who is on a simple quest for love and companionship.
Another interesting dimension to the film is the use of Jake Erlich (or Mad Men’s Don Draper), an undeniable cross-reference to a television reality of the 1960s. The courtroom scenes appeal to our palate for cheesy good-guy/bad-guy binaries, from noir to Law and Order SVU. Epstein and Friedman piece together a film from various visual and literary places*, creating an intertextual reality that is immediately relevant to a new generation, attributing both the film and poem a bouncy currency.
Ultimately, Epstein and Friedman present an intimate – and small - reading of the poem. In making the poem, not artist per se, the core focus of the film, the threads of drama carefully overlap and alter one another, challenging pre-conceived notions of the iconic Beats. The film’s world often references other visual places, bringing the film/poem into today’s world.
This structure ushers through a sense of Ginsberg’s humanity, not godliness, almost through a non-cerebral form of persuasion, like one that poetry effects. Indeed, I was shocked by my reaction to one of the final shots of the film; as a still-photo of Franco and his co-actor is merged into the real Ginsberg and his partner, this simple image accompanied by the information that they shared their life together until Ginsberg’s death in 1997 – Ginsberg’s quest for love fulfilled – I gulped.
* this phrase “visual and literary places” I heard a RRR film reviewer use in regard to this film.
