I saw the best poems of previous generations destroyed by sanity, well-fed, calm, neatly dressed, tiptoeing through lecture halls at 10am looking for a passing grade on a term paper.
It is often the fate of the most radical works of literature to overcome scandal by becoming respectable, and this fate has hardly escaped Howl, Allen Ginsberg’s first published poem, a wild Whitmanian rant that has long since become a classroom staple. The wildness is still there, of course, but the apparatus of literary immortality — the paradoxical effect of which is to keep poems alive by embalming them — can make it hard to appreciate.
Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s film Howl sets out to correct this situation by reproducing a sense of what Ginsberg’s poem might have sounded and felt like at the moment of its creation, which is presented both as a specific point in recent history and an episode of transcendence. Not quite a biopic, not really a documentary and only loosely an adaptation, Howl does something that sounds simple until you consider how rarely it occurs in films of any kind. It takes a familiar, celebrated piece of writing and makes it come alive.
Photo courtesy of AtomCinema
Every word spoken in the film is part of the historical record. The poem itself is the main source, fleshed out by a long, revealing interview that Ginsberg gave in 1957 and also by court transcripts from the obscenity trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a fellow poet whose City Lights Publishers had challenged propriety by releasing Howl and Other Poems a year earlier. What the audience sees, meanwhile, is a courtroom drama (though farce might be a better word), with Jon Hamm and David Strathairn arguing the case in front of Bob Balaban; a coffeehouse reading and a long tape-recorder session with James Franco embodying Ginsberg; black-and-white montages depicting Ginsberg’s earlier life, in particular his sexually charged friendships with Jack Kerouac (Todd Rotondi) and Neal Cassady (Jon Prescott) and his blissful union with Peter Orlovsky (Aaron Tveit); and animated sequences evoking passages from Howl.
The animations — conceived by the graphic artist Eric Drooker — are sincere, visually adept and nearly disastrous, the one serious misstep in a film that otherwise does nearly everything right. Typewriters burst into flame. Naked figures writhe and copulate and fly through the air. Silhouetted skyscrapers loom against an orange sky. It is as if an earnest, literal-minded undergraduate had set out to illustrate Howl without understanding the essential difference between poetic and pictorial imagery, a distinction that was hardly lost on Ginsberg,
a gifted photographer who counted William Blake among his crucial influences.
But Ginsberg also would have forgiven Drooker and the filmmakers for their clumsy zeal, and in any case both Howl the poem and Howl the movie are strong enough to overcome the weakness of the cartoons, which come to seem less like offenses against art than like charming, fumbling tributes to its power.
That power is manifested, above all, in Franco’s performance, which undoes (like Ginsberg himself, in person and on the page) any easy distinction between candor and guile. Reading in a San Francisco coffeehouse, Ginsberg is bold and diffident, smiling at his own bravado and wit and capturing a spirit that is oracular and playful in equal measure. He is a nervous young man in a white button-down shirt, a refugee from the Ivy League, the middle class and a New York mental institution, and also someone who has found in himself, almost by surprise, a wellspring of ecstatic inspiration.
The roots of this are explored not in the usual trauma-and-recovery movie biography style, but impressionistically, through flashbacks that accompany Ginsberg’s after-the-fact recollection. His conversation veers from the general to the particular and back again, showing him to be a creature of his time, place and associations, as well as a deep and unorthodox thinker. The milieu of the Beat Generation is evoked without being fetishized, and the period details are amusing (the casting of Hamm, for instance, in Don Draper clothes) rather than fussy.
Howl is an exemplary work of literary criticism on film, explaining and contextualizing its source without deadening it. A few academic and critical experts show up in court to defend the form and content of Howl — notably frank in its discussion of drugs and homosexuality, blasphemous and excremental in its apocalyptic visions — or to declare them worthless. Jeff Daniels has a wry, priceless turn as an English department stuffed shirt who pompously explains his “objective” conclusion that Howl is without merit.
Fifty years later, this fellow’s descendants would be assigning papers on the poem, or delivering them at learned conferences. Howl will continue to flourish, indifferent to respect and opprobrium alike, as all great poems do. And the achievement of Epstein and Friedman’s film is to recognize and communicate that greatness.
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