Howl

Last night I saw Howl at the Angelika.

It was wonderful, a really tight, beautiful, small, focused, important film.

It's focus is really the poem itself. How many movies, if any, have been made about a poem?

Several main sequences are interwoven: Allen Ginsburg reading the poem to an audience; an animated rendition of the poem; the obscenity trial surrounding the film; and a long interview with Allen Ginsburg. Spliced with the interview are small scenes of his early life.

I thought each worked surprisingly well. James Franco was perfect as Allen Ginsburg, and the interview segments were wonderful, so calm and human and writerly; it really seemed to capture the mind and orientation of the artist to the world and to his art. The animated sequences totally worked for me (although I can see people having trouble with them), and really showed a kind of underbelly of the poem. Least interesting to me was the obscenity trial, although the judge's speech at the end was beautiful and provided an important narrative arc to the movie, sort of establishing and foreshadowing the social and artistic impact Howl was to have.

I was very moved by this film, teared up at the end when they told what happened to each person, showing their actual pictures; and then, finally, Allen Ginsburg himself...