On the Road a So-So Version of Kerouac's Novel

 

ON THE ROAD (2012)

Directed by Walter Salles

IFC Films. 124 minutes, R (sex/nudity, language, violence, substance abuse)

★★★

 

 

 

In Friday’s blog about a museum in Lowell I mentioned Jack Kerouac, a native son. Today I look at the film adaptation of his most famous novel, the semi-autobiographical On the Road.

 

The movie certainly had an all-star cast: Amy Adams, Alice Braga, Kirsten Dunst, Garrett Hedlund, Elisabeth Moss, Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Stewart, Tom Sturridge.... Yet it also had a troubled path to the screen and went through numerous scripts and endured directors who dropped out of the running and multiple cast changes before executive producer Francis Ford Coppola coaxed it into existence with Brazil’s Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) at the helm. It got mixed reviews and that’s about right. It might have fared better had Kerouac never written his thinly disguised travel novel. If you’d read it, you can’t help but see the film as a streaky copy of the formative years of the Beat movement.  

 

Kerouac wrote about how he, under the pseudonym Sal Paradise, fell under the Svengali-like spell of Dean Moriarty, a Neal Cassady avatar. They split from New York City on a drug, booze, stolen car, and sexually-charged cross-country jaunt. On the Road (the novel) came out in 1957 and is a roman à clef that chronicles the spirit of their post-World War II adventures. Kerouac used aliases in most of his novels, but most were only lightly fictionalized and are easily unmasked. In the movie, Sal is played by Sam Riley, and Hedlund is Dean. Marylou (Stewart) and Camille (Dunst) are stand-in for Moriarty’s wives LuAnn and Carolyn. Carlo Marx (Sturridge) is an Allen Ginsberg surrogate and Old Bull Lee (Mortensen) a William Burroughs incarnation. Jane (Adams) parallels Joan Vollmer Burroughs and the Dunkels (Danny Morgan and Moss) portray Al and Helen Hinkle, friends of Cassady’s.

 

On the Road is, in many ways, the tale of young people (Sal, Carlo, Marylou, Camille) coming of age after falling under the spell of powerful men and mentors of the twisted variety such as Bull Lee and Dean. Marylou/LuAnn, for instance, was just 15 when she married Moriarty/Cassady and Sal/Jack followed Dean like a starry-eyed teen, though he was actually four years older. Subplots such as Sal finding his voice as a writer and Carlo coming to grips with his sexuality are shoe-horned into the film but are not particularly well integrated. Sex, though, is depicted. It fueled the Beats, along with jazz, poetry, debates in smoke-filled cafés, and devil-take-care lifestyles. Sal was particularly shy when he met Dean and turned down offers to sleep with Marylou. Dean/Neal had no inhibitions; he was bisexual and didn’t allow anything as “square” as a wedding ring to get in the way of trysts with available women and men.

 

On the Road takes us from New York to New York via Denver, Louisiana, North Carolina, California, Mexico, and points in between. In the film, Sal becomes his own person as a field worker and in Mexico, where he breaks Dean’s hold over him. The sprawling cast of characters has time to develop on the page, but is hard to condense in a movie, a partial reason why the first version ran 137 minutes before losing 13 minutes when it went into wider distribution. Neither version can really do full justice to the tone of Kerouac’s writing, which appears only as brief voice-overs in the movie. One does wonder, though, if a stronger film would have resulted had two drop-outs stayed aboard: Russell Banks as scriptwriter and Gus Van Sant as director.

 

It does have a great soundtrack. How can you go wrong with tracks from Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Son House, Charlie Parker, and Dinah Washington? Éric Gautier’s cinematography also stands out. Nor is there anything wrong with the acting. Overall, though, the film feels like a jazz ensemble on an off night– the notes are there but not the passion.

If you’ve never read On the Road, the movie might entice you to read Kerouac. If you have done so, take a look at the film and we can compare notes.

 

Rob Weir