On the Road

I loved the book enormously when i read it a couple years back. I shot through it in two days and just thought it was a fantastic read with an incredibly high energy feel to it. (Its almost like the reading equivalent of several cups of coffee) The film by contrast doesn't have any of that specific wired high energy feel to it, in fact i thought the film kind of saps some of the energy from the story by trying to place it all in the context of a story that has to have a beginning, middle, and end. I get that any adaptation of this was going to have to do some reconfiguring just because any movie is going to need to have a story with a clear through line for people who aren't familiar with the book to understand and that's OK, but at the same time it kind of takes away some of the amazing strength of the book. In fact it kind of reminded me of the Robert Redford 70's version of "the Great Gatsby" in that while faithfully recreating the scenes from the book, they kind of forgot to infuse the film with the lively energy that their source material had in spades! Enough about that tho because as a film "On The Road" is solidly enjoyable enough and pretty well made as a film that its hard not to like it in general. I did in fact watch virtually the entire movie with a huge smile on my face because i enjoyed in no small measure the staging of certain scenes from the book, as well as catching certain lines that i remembered vividly from the book but not until hearing them spoken in the film did i think about how great it was that the screenwriter and director thought to include them.

The film itself to me even gets better in retrospect because at first i didn't particularly like either Sam Rielley or Garret Hedlund as Sal or Dean. Thought they were both entirely miscast, but in truth as the film went on it was a lot easier to accept them as the characters if only because i think i had such a specific type in mind for both characters--Sal should have been less grizzled, more naive...and Dean should have been way more manic and charming instead of the fairly low key but very affable man. (i feel like maybe James Franco would've been a good choice for this cause he can definitely do both manic and depressed.) Even that i understand that you can't overdo Dean Moriarty because then you run the risk of going too far and having him not be believable as someone who could easily charm this entire group of people, but again as the film goes on, and the scenes go by--it becomes a lot easier to accept the two actors as Sal and Dean. I feel like that's actually true of the film as a whole too. It kind of starts out with a whole i don't know about this kind of vibe and it quickly wins you over because of the confident way the scenes from the book are put across. I really do feel like Walter Salles properly caught the spirit and underlying sadness of the book but didn't quite capture the mad passionate high energy level that makes the book such an intoxicating read. While that initially came to me as disappointment i got to admit that the film (much like the book its based on) grew on me as i was watching it, and if the film can't be exactly like the book, its at least a fair to solid enough interpretation of the book's characters and events that i can gladly accept and enjoy it on its own merits. (The fact that its also beautifully filmed and has a great accompanying soundtrack help enormously!)

For the record, I'm a big Kerouac fan. However, I don't think On the Road was his best work. I like his later, more introspective writing, but I know I'm in the minority here. There's a good reason why we had to wait so long for a screen version of On the Road. Impossible as it may be to believe, some novels are not written with potential movie rights in mind. On the Road is a sometimes rambling, stream of consciousness, string of vignettes without a clear goal in mind. It is a novel about hedonistic-death-driving on America's highways in a quest for life and a run from it. For the members of Kerouac's (Sal Paradise's) group, life is controlled self-destruction because death is preferable to boredom. These attitudes spring from the times in which the reality of potential nuclear disaster hung over the nation and the attitudes so induced found expression in youth who turned the directionlessness of life into life for the moment.

Making a film on such a book requires selection. Kerouac's hedonistic rampage across America, as selected by director Walter Salles, looks more mindless and sex-spiced than it did in the novel. Kerouac, as we see in his later works, was a hedonist with a conscience; a deadly combination which likely led to him drinking himself to death. Director Salles sees what he wants to see, a sex-crazed, drug-crazed, two-dimensional man. If this was truly the man represented in the novel, the novel would not have had the enduring quality that has made it literature.

I liked the way the 1950s was captured in the film. It was as close to perfection as you could get. The importance of jazz with its improvisation mirrors the lives of the travelers. The acting is good but the interaction is not. Maybe that was the point. There is no need for interaction in an age when the highest morality was based on selfishness. The movie may be okay to watch once, but I would prefer not to go down this road again.

One of the aspects this film really lacked was an understanding of the zeitgeist of Beat America in the late forties and fifties of Post-World War Two America. The conservative middle class that Ronald Reagan defended was in full swing and there were those who did not fit in and did not know where to go, and this is where the Beats fit in. It was L seven heaven square land and people with creative vision didn't have the flavor for materialism. The idea in the mind was just as secure as house in the suburbs. Plus I saw no James Joycean stream of consciousness with the speed, booze and the jazz. Where was the poetry? You see people moving around, dancing, snapping fingers and being "hip" but no expression of what was going on within. The characters I saw were 21st century self-centered users, dopers, and boozers who could not afford a day of tasting wine in Napa Valley, so it's everyone else's fault. The most real character in the film that captures the sense of the time was Viggo Mortensen's Old Bull Lee/William S. Burroughs. That worked. Carlo Marx, the Ginsberg attempt should have been called Harpo Marx. I was howling at the idea that this was suppose to be the person that wrote Howl. The art direction and cinematography did keep me watching instead of leaving. But remember, it does say based on the book On The Road.

Hemingway was terrified of being boring. Compared to Hemingway, Kerouac was completely & utterly fearless.

So let's take a page out one of Kerouac's best books, start at the beginning, & let the truth seep out.

I first encountered "On the Road" in the public library when I was in 6th grade. It spawned a fascination, an obsession, an addiction. Between the age of 12 & 18, outside of school, the Beat writers were all that I read. I devoured them. And in the years since my youth Kerouac has morphed from an obsession to a comfort author, I read him to help cushion the blows life brings. "Maggie Cassidy," is still my favorite.

That being said, I walked into this flick with extremely low expectations. I'm more than familiar with the source material & couldn't see how it could translate into anything but a dull film. I expected the film to stagnate. I wasn't really disappointed in this. Anyone that has read "On the Road" has to question the wisdom of attempting to translate that into a decent movie.

Like the novel, there are parts of this film you just have to fight through in the hopes that he'll move off his love for grape picking & into something interesting again.

The plus side is, once you make it past the stagnation, the plot picks up again & you feel the sense of freedom having overcome the monotony of Kerouac. But on the other-hand, I'm fairly certain that's the point.

The bottom line is that if you are familiar with Travelin' Jack you know what to expect before you walk into the film & you walk out with an experience far better than you would have thought it's be. It's an enjoyable film.

However, if you're like most of the world & for some reason do not read, you'll be expecting the legend without understanding the reality & you will hate it, for no other reason than the lack of background necessary to expect Kerouac to be, well, Kerouac.

There are very few works of 20th-century American literature that can be called indispensable to our understanding of our culture. And one of these few is Jack Kerouac's On the Road. As everyone knows, it's the thinly-veiled autobiographical account of Kerouac and his friends in their pointless but exuberant adventures across America. For 50 years, it's been waiting to be made into a movie. Now, at last.

So, everyone already knows the story… well, no; chances are, if you're like me, you read the book and yet remember almost nothing of the story. The book burns through its shreds of storyline as if they were just tinder for the blaze of its energy; the real fuel is the pacing, even with all its redundancy. It's the momentum that sucks us into the breathless chaos of Kerouac's world. We come away impressed by the energy, not the content.

Film could certainly have been used to amplify this effect, but this is not that film. Instead, we have a more conventional treatment, focusing on character development. It's a nice production, with an attractive cast. But the story comes at us very differently from the book experience. The manuscript has been rewritten to add breathing space and objectivity. We see Sal Paradise, only half-formed at the start of the story, pull himself together to become a serious writer. We see the endlessly exuberant Dean Moriarity ultimately coming to grips with the progressive self- destruction attributable to his amorality, and suffering. This might be a fair reading of Kerouac's ultimate feelings about that part of his life, but it's not the feeling that Kerouac shares with us in the book. We have lost our innocence; our last chance to revisit it, even for a few hours, is taken away.

I'm not going to rage against this re-conception of the story, though, because it makes other changes from the book that might be improvements. Several episodes that were censored from the book are restored in the film. (Some discussion of this at http://www.univie.ac.at/Anglistik/easyrider/data/BeatEros.htm). So the movie is more historically accurate, and far more sexually explicit than the book. (That could also explain its delayed US release). In one poignant scene, Carlos Marx (Allen Ginsberg) is whining to Sal about how vulnerable he feels due to his poorly-returned love for Dean. To the best of my recollection, that conversation was not in the book (please tell me if you believe otherwise), but was expressed in a private letter from Ginsberg to Kerouac many years after the fact. This kind of thing changes the emotional flow of the story, certainly, but it adds depth, too.

Few of us will actually suffer nostalgia for the gritty overindulgences of the Beats. But remember, this came at a time when society was absolutely saturated with the message that everyone should be "normal," safe, predictable. Without the tiny minority of Beats attacking that message, and specifically without On The Road to chronicle that attack, the cultural revolution of the 1960's would have been even more difficult than it was, and perhaps less effective. Good, bad, or ugly, we must embrace this story.