![]() ![]() ![]() The best thing about "The Rum Diary" is that it gives us this side of him without apology, even, I suspect, with a kind of pride. In later years, as Thompson refined and embellished his prose, as he invented and quickly personified the gonzo style, it became harder and harder to remember that at the core of this hard-drinking, hard-talking, hard-living man is a moralist, a Puritan, even an innocent. Yet his eyes were clear enough to see the beauties of a tiny island called Vieques and to know that, doing hack work for a developer, he "was being paid $25 a day to ruin the only place I'd seen in ten years where I felt a sense of peace." ![]() Thompson's eye for the ludicrous and incongruous obviously was already developed at this early stage in his career, and so too was his acidulous pen: "What passed for society was a loud, giddy whirl of thieves and pretentious hustlers, a dull sideshow full of quacks and philistines with gimp mentalities." The images that Thompson later would refine in Las Vegas and on the campaign trail had already taken shape in his mind. In this film image released by Film District, Johnny Depp, left, and Aaron Eckhart are shown in a scene from "The Rum Diary." (AP Photo/Film District, Peter Mountain) (PETER MOUNTAIN/AP) ![]()
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