Review of Howl (2010) by Jim H — 10 Jun 2012

Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" is put on trial for obscenity.

Howl is basically a biographical gloss of the poem "Howl" with added stylistic elements inspired by Ginsberg's illustrations. The main problem with the film relates to a question of audience. It doesn't appeal to people who have no familiarity with the poem and its associated literary history; as examples, if you don't know who Neal Cassady is, the film won't tell you, and if you don't know the intellectual basis for Dadaism, then the Jeff Daniels character, who uses it as his primary attack against the poem, won't give you a brief outline. So the film isn't for people who slept through their American literature survey course, but because I do know that Cassady is the basis for Dean Moriarty in Kerouac's On the Road and that Dadaism embraced gut reactions and moment-to-moment inspiration as the foundation for art, eschewing reason and logic, and because I actually taught "Howl" in an American literature survey course, one might assume that I am in Howl's audience. But I'm not. If this film is for such a select group of people, then it misses even this mark. Witnesses testify about "Howl's" "literary merit," but the conversation is so surface that it fails to explore the issue with any depth; all of the witnesses -- those on Ginsberg's side and those against him -- deploy arguments that could so easily be challenged that I was left wanting a greater exploration of the issue. Even Jake Ehrlich's final speech about freedom and artistic expression sounds like something from a fifth grade civics debate.

James Franco creates a good character in Ginsberg, but his reading of the poem, which is delivered in pieces almost in full, doesn't capture Ginsberg's frenetic energy. The animation does, nicely complementing the poem's images, but there's still too much missing from Howl to make it much better than a good copy of Cliff's Notes.