Sur la route

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.

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.

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!)

I will try to be as short as I can be in my review, but I am just very surprised about the very positive reviews on IMDb. For me this was another huge disappointment. yes there are great landscapes, the photography is nice and the actors surely are OK, the music is often inspiring, but even if the movie basically tells the same events as in the book, I found it pretty boring, and above all the spirit of the book, about freedom etc, was completely gone. Too many scenes are just taken inside hotels rooms, houses etc, isn't this movie entitled on the road? Again, regarding the spirit of freedom, in the book surely wasn't all about sex and multiple partners etc, because that's not at all the freedom Jack Kerouac was talking about when he wrote it, these components have been way too much highlighted. I am sorry but I left the cinema pretty disappointed, if we had to wait all these year for a version of the book, and this is the result, well it would have been better to only have the book.

I give this film 3 out of 10 stars because I was extremely bored with the subject matter of the film. It felt like it would never ever end. It was a constant cacophony of meaningless conversations. I could not connect to any of the characters. The protagonist played by Riley was likable enough, but the whole ensemble felt like they lacked depth. Having never fully read the novel because I felt the same painful boredom from it, I'm not really sure if the characters are meant to have any depth or if they represent any particular archetypes. I can say I felt absolute nothing during my viewing of this film and it is a shame. I am a fan of Hedlund.