On The Road Plays Kerouac's Notes, But Misses The Melody
By Rob Christopher in Arts & Entertainment on Mar 22, 2013 5:50PM
Sam Riley stars in On the Road. (Photo credit: Gregory Smith/IFC Films.)
Jack Kerouac's On the Road is beyond legendary. The seemingly free-form chronicle of a group of friends as they roam the landscape of post-WWII America in search of freedom and kicks, it's one of only a handful of 20th century novels that can accurately be described as momentous. It actually did redraw the boundaries of what a novel could do. No wonder that many previous attempts at turning it into a film came to naught. Writer/director Francis Ford Coppola, who bought the film rights back in 1968, had long been stymied.
As it turned out, Coppola did help bring the novel to the screen, but only as producer, handing the reins to director Walter Salles and screenwriter José Rivera. Their attempt to translate Kerouac's novel to the screen is a valiant try, but in trying to get all the notes right, they miss the book's melody. Their movie is well cast, well played, well mounted and, overall, extremely well crafted. And yet it feels unnecessary.
Now, if "unnecessary" is the worst adjective you can use to describe a movie, then you could hardly call that movie a disaster. And On the Road certainly isn't; if only in fits and starts, it does capture the sheer speed and exuberance of the book. And its unabashed enthusiasm for the culture and music of the era (especially Slim Gaillard) is often infectious. In one of the best scenes, almost a throwaway bit, the two main characters Sal and Dean hang out after-hours with a jazz musician played by Terrence Howard. It's a loose, funny vignette that makes you feel the frisson of different cultures colliding. If only there were more moments like it. In prioritizing "fidelity" to the text above all else, the movie neglects the more important task of feeling vital—a problem Kerouac's book, even more than fifty years later, doesn't have.
In the original novel, it's achingly clear that the characters are essentially thinly disguised versions of real people (and even had their actual names, in the first draft). Protagonist and narrator Sal Paradise is, of course, Jack Kerouac himself; "mad poet" Carlo Marx is Allen Ginsberg; Old Bull Lee is William S. Burroughs. And so on. Now, on the page, this is perfectly fine: a reader's imagination slowly creates its own portrait of the characters. Like the best books, reading On the Road is a kind of collaboration between Kerouac and the reader.
Unfortunately the movie seems bent on taking the literal approach. Carlo Marx, as conceived by Salles and played by Tom Sturridge, is Allen Ginsberg, complete with horn-rimmed glasses and crazy hair. When Viggo Mortensen pops in for an extended cameo, armed with a gravelly, laconic drawl, who else can he playing other than Burroughs? Though all the actors are fine, this rigid insistence on "accuracy" ensures that their characters are little more than vivid waxworks. As our viewing companion so wonderfully put it, you can't picture a life for any of these people beyond the scenes they appear in.
A few performances manage to break out of this straightjacket, including Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty. Possibly because Neal Cassady, the real life person whom Keroauc described, seems more obscure today, Hedlund actually runs with the role and creates an honest-to-god character. He genuinely captures the charismatic conman side to Dean, a guy who's so devastatingly handsome, charming, and full of verve it's hard to believe someone wouldn't chase across America with him. If there's a drug to ingest, a thrill to be had, or a girl to screw, he won't take no for an answer.
One of those girls is Marylou (Kristen Stewart, doing her best Lolita). Ping-ponging from guy to guy, up for the occasional threeway, and largely content to live and let live, she embodies the filmmakers' commendable commitment not to shy away from the source material's ingrained sexism. Largely a "Guys Only" club, for all their proclamations of society's narrow-mindedness, the Beats preferred their women to stay in bed and at home. Amy Adams is magnetic in her handful of scenes as Lee's wife Jane, but her only function is to be an eccentric with unusual notions of homemaking.
Sam Riley, as Sal Paradise, is boxed into playing a character that unfortunately is old hat by now: the Earnest Young Writer. (And, joining many filmmakers before him, Salles does his damnedest to make writing look really intense through the use of montages featuring pencils, palm-sized notebooks, and typewriters.) Nonetheless Riley does get one thing absolutely right: the voice, a kind of youthful, froggy bray that's completely captivating. The copious voiceover in the movie sounds so wonderful that, frankly, it makes you wish you could just listen to him perform an audiobook version of the novel.
How different this On the Road is from David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, a movie that captures the spirit of its source while avoiding the trap of virtual transcription. Kerouac wrote, "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn...” Salles' movie could've used a lot of more of that spirit.
On the Road
Directed by Walter Salles
Screenplay by José Rivera, based on On the Road by Jack Kerouac
With Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart, Amy Adams, Tom Sturridge, Danny Morgan, Alice Braga, Elisabeth Moss, Kirsten Dunst, Viggo Mortensen
Running time: 124 minutes
Rated R
Opens Friday, Mar. 21 at Landmark's Century Centre Cinema