Howl (Howl - Das Geheul; 2010)

The movie Howl (2010) is a monument to an artist and his most famous work of literature. 

James Franco brilliantly portrays the poet Allen Ginsberg as a fragile man who suffers under the circumstances he lives in and believes in his art as the only way of being true to himself as well as honest to the world. Not only does he resemble Ginsberg (who explains his working process and his reasons for writing Howl in taped interviews which make up a third of the movie). He also manages to convey the atmosphere of the poem and makes us feel its intensity in a scene where he reads it out to an audience at the Six Gallery in October 1955– an audience who hang onto his lips because both the poem and its writer seem to be what they had been looking for: Someone who shares their thoughts and inner conflicts. Someone who understands.

However, the main character can actually be considered the poem itself which is read by a man whose identity we do not know unless we fast forward to the credits at the end of the movie. His dark threatening voice coheres with animated sequences which underline the poem and enhance its meaning to the point where he might be saying a prayer instead of what might be the most controversial poem of the 20^th century. 

This brings us to the actual plot: the 1957 obscenity trial against Lawrence Ferlinghetti, co-founder of City Lights Bookstore and the first person to publish the poem in “Howl and other poems”. David Strathairn plays the attorney Ralph McIntosh who represents the bigotry and prudery of the 1950s. His opponent Jake Ehrlich, played by John Hamm, believes in freedom of speech and artistic license. During the process where a few literary experts are asked to give their opinion of the poem, Ehrlich manages to reveal their double standards and poses the question if a piece of writing can only be considered art if it lives up to the reader’s expectations and society’s idea of what should be uttered in public. The result of the process, as groundbreaking as it might have been at that time, could have been portrayed in a much more spectacular way. People who were not familiar with the case before seeing the movie, like me, might be a little disappointed. 

However, the real Allen Ginsberg makes it clear that he never cared much about the public opinion. It is therefore only logical that the directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman put most emphasis on the poem itself in a way that makes us want to read it at once. Howl shows what a movie on a poem can and should do.

RATING: 4.5/5