Sur la route

It's the late 1940s, and young writer Sal Paradise's father has just died. He hangs out with friends in bars and struggles with writers' block. But when he meets charismatic Dean, Sal decides to follow his new friend's lead and take to the road on a cross-country trip across America.

Let's start with the good, shall we? The supporting cast are excellent, and special mention should be given to Tom Sturridge. He plays Carlo (Allen Ginsberg's alter ego), who spends much of the film intensely brooding over his broken heart, his writing, his wild ambitions. A quiet scene in which he tries to articulate his feelings towards Dean is one of my favourite in the whole film. Elisabeth Moss and Amy Adams also have blink-and-you-miss-it supporting roles, and they both easily outshine their higher-billed co-stars.

Unfortunately, that's about all the praise I can muster.

We are informed, time and time again, that Dean is charismatic, charming, infectiously reckless and dangerous and sexy. Sal, Carlo and Marylou can't get enough of him. He makes their lives better, more complete, more exciting. And yet Hedlund, for whatever reason, completely fails to shine on the screen. Good looking, yes, but charming he is not.

Reading the film's trivia page, previous attempted adaptations of Kerouac's book had the likes of Marlon Brando and Brad Pitt in mind to play the role of Dean. It makes me disappointed, embarrassed and slightly angry that the film's producers, in their search for our generation's equivalent to Brando and Pitt, settled on Garrett Hedlund. Was there really no one else available? What about Aaron Taylor-Johnson? Or Sam Claflin? Or Miles Teller, maybe? Or anyone who actually manages to make beautiful lines of prose sound more exciting than the phonebook? Objections have also been raised about some of the other main cast members, but although none of them - with the exception of Sturridge - lit the screen alight, none of them ruined the film either.

But of course, this film was always going to disappoint. It was always going to disappoint because it was built on a shaky foundation. The film's underlying problem, the problem that was always going to be a problem even if everything else was perfect, was what the script isn't good enough.

Any film worth watching tells you what its characters want. It's a character's pursuit of his/her personal goal that drives the whole plot. There was no sense here that the characters wanted anything in particular. There was talk of writing, but only in passing, as a way to spark a conversation in between drags of a joint. The characters talked, and laughed, and drank, and danced and travelled. But none of it really mattered because, in the end, none of them really changed.

I'm aware, of course, that Kerouac's book is a much-loved piece of literature, which leads me to conclude that it must be much, much better than this film. If that's the case, then fine. Read the book. Love the book. But it's not enough to trust that an audience's love for a story told in one medium will necessarily transfer into a love for the story in a different medium. The film feels like it relies too heavily on people knowing - and liking - the characters of the book, and in doing so fails to deliver an adaptation worthy of its source material.

The On The Road novel has inspired numerous readers, myself included to take an American road trip. Will the film have the same effect? I sincerely doubt it. And herein lays the problem. Whilst the book takes the reader on an exuberant, spirited journey full of life, the film puzzlingly slows the pace right down and presents a muted, almost depressed version of the same story.

This is best illustrated by the presentation of the character of Dean Moriarty. He should be the driving force of the story, pushing the storyline on with his crazed excitement for the good and bad in life. On the printed page he can barely speak fast enough to get all his thoughts out. However in the film he huffs and puffs his way from one scene to the next, speaking in a laconic drawl, whilst lacking all the charm and charisma that is supposed to make him so alluring. He is the muse for the writer character of Sal, but anyone coming to the film fresh without having read the book, may well struggle to understand why.

The film lacks a rounded sense of the hedonistic side of the journey. The sex is arguably overplayed and whilst there is some drugs and jazz, there is little of the booze. Crucially the characters rarely seem to be having a good time. The film seems to focus on the melodramatic, miserable aspects of the characters lives at the destinations they travel to, but fails to contrast this with wild and exciting times spent on the road. The film does not convey a sense of travelling for the journeys sake; they always just seem to be in the car in order to get to another destination. The only time the film gets anywhere near the free spirited adventure of the book is when the characters reach Mexico in the later stages of the film, but this is too little too late.

I did wonder whether the muted atmosphere of the film was a deliberate ploy of the filmmakers, however the last ten minutes would indicate not. Here we see the character of Sal typing up the notes he has made during the road trips, seemingly franticly typing to capture all the wild, fun, crazy times had on the road. However this does not reflect what the viewer has just witnessed on screen for the past two hours.

Taken on its own terms the film does offer fine cinematography, costume and the look of the time, as well as some decent acting (hence my score of 5 out of 10). However as an adaption of a seminal piece of literature, it deserves to be judged against the source material and in not capturing the true spirit of the book, it is a big fail.

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.

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.

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.