The People vs Larry Flynt

The People vs. Larry Flynt is not your normal biographical film. There is no grandstanding urge to make his history and personality more crowd pleasing, allowing us to walk away knowing that, yes, this person did something good and deserved a movie made about them. They were noble and heroic. Or, the approach where we focus on an entire life that has been lived, warts and all, but largely fictionalized and filled with imagined characters and scenes. The People vs. Larry Flynt is filled with conversations and situations which can be documented for, situations which required court documentations to be more precise. There is no white-washing, and the only crowd pleasing is that someone has fought so hard for our right to say, print and create whatever we damn well please. Is Larry Flynt an American hero and patriot? In a way, yes but getting to how that works is a later argument.

There is a brief glimpse into his childhood, but that serves more as a scene to explain his work ethic and commitment to his ideals. That, and he’s always been a purveyor of filth of some kind. In that scene, moonshine, in the rest of the film it’s pornography. And it makes no attempt to classy it up like Playboy. Hustler is pure filth. Smut of the highest order, complete with questionable parodies and cartoons. This is not about how he went from rags to riches by providing a service to horny truck drivers, this is how he used his smut peddling to uphold the Constitution.

As played by Woody Harrelson, Flynt is slightly charming, even damaged, but prone to childish antics, temper tantrums and bouts of sheer unlikability. His performance is a tour de force, he never impersonates Flynt, although he does get the cadence and timber of his voice after getting shot, but instead creates a hellish wild child. He fluctuates between comedic blustering and dramatic pathos with equal ease. This performance anchors the film and allows for us to see that, just maybe, the man who created Hustler is a real genius in the business world. Harrelson is given great support from Edward Norton as his lawyer, James Cromwell as a seedy politician hiding behind a mask of righteousness and Courtney Love as his doomed, wild child wife.

But how is Flynt a patriot? He unflinchingly withheld his belief that the Constitution protected his right to produce the tasteless, morally questionable and absolutely grotesque images, articles and opinions that Hustler trades its stock in. If the Constitution could protect him, as he believed and proved that it would and could, it would do the same for the likes of us normal folks. He proved something about American politics that few politicians would even dare to tread. Is he a purveyor of bad taste? Oh, yes, unquestionably. Has he provided a great service to his country? Oh, yes, unquestionably. He just didn’t do it in a way that anyone saw coming.

I feel like this movie is too little seen, too often misunderstood. There is no glorification of pornography, there is nothing that states what he does is fine, well and good. The film challenges his right to say and do it. It only makes the argument that our Freedom of Speech is there to protect ALL speech, especially that which we hate.