- Read the poem
By Sydney Cohen
James Franco artistically portrays controversial poet, Allen Ginsberg author of “Howl.” Ginsberg wrote “Howl” when he was 31, in the late 1950s, he was homosexual and had an unconventional upbringing.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Andrew Rogers) who published and distributed “Howl,” was indicted by the United States for publishing and distributing obscene work, obscene, meaning a work that is inclined to give lustful thoughts and has not literary merit.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Andrew Rogers) who published and distributed “Howl,” was indicted by the United States for publishing and distributing obscene work, obscene, meaning a work that is inclined to give lustful thoughts and has not literary merit.
The movie takes a journey into this courtroom, also shows a biography of Ginsberg at the time, Ginsberg (Franco) reading the poems, and animations interpreting the meaning of the poems.
Franco recites the poems using a Ginsberg’s type of cadence while the poems are visually translated with animation. The animation is “part-biographical, part-metaphorical, part-imagistic and largely hallucinogenic,” says Stanley Fish, a writer for the New York Times. The visual translations reminded me how hard it is to interpret what a poet means, what percentage of people would know “concrete cocks” were chimney stacks representing an over industrialized nation.
This brings me to Jeff Daniels, as English Professor David Kirk, who tries for the prosecution to translate some of the phrases of the poem. The back and forth between Daniels and David Strathairn (as prosecutor Ralph McIntosh) gets ironically funny. McIntosh does not and maybe will never understand the true meaning of this book, all he knows is the book references homosexual encounters and other unfamiliar situations to him. Strathairn does an outstanding job of being ignorant. His past movies like “Good Night, and Good Luck,” and “L. A. Confidential,” make him the go-to man for 1950 era films.
Mary-Louise Parker plays expert witness, Gail Potter, for the prosecution. Her stoic presence and obvious repulsion by the poem, while being a polite woman of the 50s, makes her performance mentionable.
On the sidelines is Jon Hamm, defense lawyer for the publication company on trial for printing obscene material. Because of his work in “Mad Men,” Jon Hamm is very appropriate for the movie’s sense of the times.
The coolest thing about this movie is that I have heard of Allen Ginsberg, but never really knew what his story was. I think that this movie’s best quality is giving people from my generation and the ones to follow a good source to interpret and try understand the controversy that was created around this poem. The poems are very interesting and timely of the late 1950s and give an education to viewers about the prosecution of homosexuals, and the general feeling people had against their society at the time.
The movie was educational. It seemed very short for only an hour and a half. The translations with animation make the movie worth seeing.
The publisher was not convicted, and the judge went on record to say the poem had "redeeming social importance,” setting an important legal precedent. This trial set legal boundaries for what could be published, pushing American artists into a new topic of rebellion for their work, just in time for the 60s.
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