Word: buffalo
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...cabin where Hunter Thompson, amidst his strange interior decoration, struggles to meet his latest deadline. He guzzles liquor as he types, shoots his telephone, and cavorts with his Doberman, who is trained to attack on the word "Nixon." But, all too soon, our hero begins reminiscing and Where the Buffalo Roam slides into the quicksand of banality...
When Thompson meets up with Laszlo and Billy four years after the lad's conviction, the two have become gun-running revolutionaries, holed up in a shack somewhere in southern California with a small army of violent Chicanos. At this point, Where the Buffalo Roam almost makes a statement about how injustice breeds violence and corrupts the concerned and the innocent. But Laszlo and Billy are so two-dimensional the message falls flat. Laszlo seems merely to have reached a new plateau of raving fanaticism and Billy becomes the standard Victim of Society. Worse still, this hideout scene quickly degenerates...
THOMPSON'S PUBLISHER, played with inappropriate solemnity by Bruno Kirby, serves as a perfect example of Where the Buffalo Roam's failure to explore its observations about life in the Nixon era. As the years pass and his magazine becomes more successful, the publisher trades in his Levis for a three-piece suit and brings his golf clubs to work to practice his putting. But all this character does is rant at Thompson. Linson and Kaye seem afraid to get too serious, so instead of examining or satirizing the publisher's establishmentarianization, they pad his scenes with dumb lines about...
Murray emerges tainted but unscathed from Where the Buffalo Roam's idiotic Big Message scene in which Thompson, confronting Nixon in a men's room, pleads with the president to look out for the "doomed." Nixon leans over the growls the stupidly profound line, "Fuck the doomed." The fact that Murray makes this scene bearable is testimony to his talent...
...film, we rejoin Thompson in his cabin as he bangs out his story. The movie says nothing about the New Journalism or about Thompson's vision. Where the Buffalo Roam ignores Thompson's peculiar optimism, his cynical idealism that makes him distrust the system but hope obstinately for something better. The only insight the film makes into Thompson's character comes when, reflecting upon his bizarre adventures, he sighs, "It never got weird enough...