SIFF Review: Howl

A White Tank Top Movie Review

The SIFF volunteers at the Egyptian had to shoehorn in all the poetry lovers who wanted to see Allen Ginsberg’s Howl immortalized on screen. Cheek by jowl, we watched as James Franco did his best Ginsberg impersonation, beginning at the beginning: “I saw the best minds of my generation…” This segues right into a jazz riff credit sequence — be bop e dee!

Howl oscillates between four storytelling modes (this, we are told, somehow mimics the four sections of the poem). There is a black and white restaging of the first public reading of “Howl” at Six Gallery in October 1955. Another thread features Ginsberg, now bearded and in full color, undertaking a long interview in New York City. Then there is a self-contained courtroom drama of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s obscenity trial for publishing “Howl.” The final, ill-advised motif is a series of animated sequences based on the poem’s imagery.

That the animations are stylistically inconsistent is a secondary issue — the parade of writing process clichés is the larger problem. Ginsberg is just typing words on his typewriter when — lo — they become musical notes!  He begins pecking more frantically and the words are so incendiary that the page is set on fire! There are literally stars dancing in his eyes when he writes! The animated sequences are kind of like going to the Pacific Science Center to watch Laser Howl.

Read the rest of the review after the jump.

The movie rests on Franco’s shoulders in the sense that co-directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman make no attempt to develop other characters.  Franco is a charming enough actor (though it is hard not to begrudge him, especially in this film, his embarrassing fiction that Esquire recently saw fit to print) and there are good insights into Ginsberg’s life in the wide-ranging interview scenes. I particularly enjoyed his characterization of the Beat Generation as “a bunch of guys trying to get published.”  Aren’t we all?

The other star names in Howl are concentrated in the courtroom. As Ferlinghetti’s defense attorney Jake Ehrlich, Jon Hamm mostly made me hope Christina Hendricks would stop by for some legal counsel. (When does Season 4 of Mad Men start? Wouldn’t Don Draper have preferred this movie were it based on “Meditations in an Emergency”?) In any case, Don acts like himself, though his hair is a bit too long in the back and his pocket square is not square enough.

His foil is prosecutor Ralph McIntosh (David Strathairn, smelling a rat) who’s no lover of poetry (he refers to blocks of verse as paragraphs rather than stanzas). When he asks, “what are angel-headed hipsters?” we are unnecessarily provided with a documentary clip of dancing hipsters in answer.  It’s worth noting that no similar illustration was provided for the crucial line in the prosecution’ case: “who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy.”

I enjoyed the way witnesses called to the stand are essentially doing a high level workshop of “Howl” to determine if it has literary merit. The most interesting participant is a professor played by Jeff Daniels (with a whiff of his Bernard Berkman from The Squid in the Whale), who would not call “Howl” the filet of contemporary poetry. He spars nicely with Ehrlich on whether the theme and form of the poem make it a “valid” work of art.

It’s a shame that Ferlinghetti, for my money the better writer and more interesting human, isn’t permitted to say even one word in the film, though he’s shown repeatedly in court. Perhaps he could have commented on how it felt to be on trial for Ginsberg’s work while the poet was vacationing in Tangiers.

Despite my complaints, I will grant that the Ginsberg interview does come to an important point in the end. The “Howl” obscenity trial did help establish the right to frankly express your fetishes, whatever they may be, in art. 

As for the poem itself, and Franco’s insufferable reenactment, I felt like I was at a bad reading (without even a jug of wine for consolation), just watching the stack of pages dwindle until it was over.