Sur la route

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 agree with the earlier review ..."..our last chance to revisit it, even for a few hours, is taken away..." Yep. I read the book soon after its publication and, like the above reviewer, only remember the intensity, the poetry. My memory is that there was no real story line. But wonderful evocations of crossing the country in the old Hudson, at night...something about the feeling of being in that capsule. Just one of the many quibbles I have with this movie is that it showed us the Hudson speeding across the screen from left to right...an exterior view. Nothing of the romance of being in the car as it hurtled along. Lots of scenes of Dean driving dangerously, but that tells us something about Dean...that isn't what the book was saying about being in the car.

Okay. Anyway..anachronisms...

I graduated high school in 1957. I remember the hair cuts for girls...I was one of them. Marylou did not wear the cut shown in the movie. No long layers. Long hair , yes, but not long layers. That's very contemporary...It's distracting. Ever hear of "pin curls?"

Restaurant servers did not start saying "Enjoy" until at least the 90's. Remember the carefully recreated restaurant toward the end of the movie...the middle aged, somewhat overweight waitress in the red uniform? Never would she have said "enjoy."

I think some of the cars seen rushing from one side of the screen to the other in the early part of the movie were not available in the late 40's. Looked like Chevys from about 1953.

So much was carefully done...the paint peeling in the old Victorians when Victorians were low rent...yes! That very restaurant mentioned above.

Come on, there are lots of us still living. Hire a consultant next time.

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.

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.

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.