Why does everybody hate Howl?

It surprises me how hateful some of the reviewers feel towards this film, so I have decided to analyze its controversies myself. After spending few minutes meditating on its advantages and disadvantages, I still thing the furthest you can get in creating your opinion is to call this film completely neutral, as in ‘doesn’t work’. Hating this film seems a huge statement against it, and I would love to find out what makes so many people feel so negatively about it. Let’s start from the plot...

To be honest, there isn’t much to say about the plot. There isn’t much happening in the movie. It is basically the story of everything associated to Ginsberg’s poem, Howl. Thus, we are presented with four different layers of form different realities, which can be both frustrating and interesting to some extend. Two of them the creators could easily remove, and that is definitely number one problem with Howl.

‘Howl’, the poem, has been published and immediately put to courts because of its controversial verses. Ginsberg uses extremely visual sexual descriptions often referring to homosexuality and male nudity. Throughout the film, we are bombarded with quotes from the poem, which I think are superbly recited by James Franco (Allen Ginsberg). The spoken verses are powerful and inspiring, however, each of them is repeated in the film at least three times which often makes them lose their power. Although Franco makes an astonishing recitation when we simply see him standing in front of a small audience made mostly of his friends, the poem accompanied with animation becomes weird rather than striking. Read in the court is also a good idea, however, it is treated sillily and naively, as if Ginsberg meant only to provoke. The fragments that we already heard twice don’t actually seem controversial anymore, and in the court scene their aim is to disturb us. As if this wasn’t enough, we also see James Franco reacting Allen Ginsberg’s interview. And this is the fourth time we hear exactly the same lines.

If we separated these four layers from each other and watch four films based on each of them, every one of them would possibly be equally good. However, when mixing them all up, they become bland and unnecessary. Too often did I think that the creators of the movie used scene as pointless fillers. We are in black and white world of young Ginsberg presenting his poem for the first time, colour world of the court in which Howl is discussed, colour world of the interview in which Ginsberg tells the story which we are now watching and surreal world of animation that graphically accompanies the reading of the poem. The animation itself is not brilliant and is too modern for the atmosphere we try to experience.

There is amazing performance of James Franco as Ginsberg. The film is interesting for the first ten minutes. Ginsberg’s Howl is definitely one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century. But you know what, I actually hate this film now. It could have been so much better...