By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3.5 cats
Director: Walter Salles
Starring: Alice Braga | Amy Adams | Elisabeth Moss | Garrett Hedlund | Kristen Stewart | Sam Riley | Tom Sturridge
Country: brazil, france, united_kingdom, united_states
Year: 2013
Running time: 124
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0337692/combined
Chris says: “The best one can say about this, the first filmed version of Jack Kerouac’s seminal 1957 novel is that it’s not embarrassing. If that sounds like faint praise, it aptly mirrors the film’s modest ambitions. Rather than transform Kerouac’s Beat Generation primer into something iconic meant to transcend generations (such as how the 1962 film of To Kill A Mockingbird has a equally rich life apart from the novel), this adaptation is simply a faithful rendering of the book’s central story—the burgeoning and eventually strained friendship between narrator and Kerouac alter-ego Sal Paradise and magnetic hustler/bum Dean Moriarty (a stand-in for Kerouac’s friend Neal Cassady) with the slowly surfacing counterculture of late 1940s America as a backdrop.
“Why then does this film seem at times like a small miracle? Its humble success is due to how well it confronts two common presumptions: one, that the book, which reads more like a thinly veiled memoir-cum-travelogue than a novel is unfilmable; and two, that any Hollywood adaptation would iron out all of Kerouac’s endearing jaggedness and reduce his heroes to beat-culture clichés. Director Walter Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera take care of the former by fleshing out the book’s rambling narrative with allusions to the characters’ real life counterparts—for example, scenes of Sal struggling through the writing process of what will become Kerouac’s novel acts as a framing device.
“As for the latter, Salles and Rivera show ample restraint in their adaptation. Far less mushy than their other road movie, THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES (which was set just a few years later), they make up for their reverence to Kerouac’s style and legend by letting the action unfold at a skittering, by-the-seat-of-one’s-pants pace. They also eschew a traditional symphonic score for appropriately jazzier hues. The casting ranges from inspired (Garret Hedlund is a perfect Dean and this should have been a breakthrough role for him) to unexpected (Sam Riley, a Brit best known for his Ian Curtis in Control, doesn’t resemble Sal/Kerouac much, although he mimics Kerouac’s voice flawlessly) to predictably great (Viggo Mortensen, who, as Old Bull Lee, shows he could easily carry an entire William Burroughs biopic) to godawful (that soul sucking vortex Kristen Stewart as Dean’s lover Mary Lou, and this is from someone who liked the pre-TWILIGHT Stewart). To point out one of Kerouac’s greatest deficiencies, the female characters feel noticeably skeletal compared to the males, although Kirsten Dunst and Elisabeth Moss do what they can with their underwritten roles.
“Despite its competence and good intentions, ON THE ROAD is an easy film to like but a hard one to love. Its mere existence as a film right now, over fifty years after the novel’s publication presents a conundrum: had it been made in the 1950s (or perhaps even the late 1960s/early 1970s by Robert Altman or Peter Fonda, whose Easy Rider is a hippie-centric riff on the material), it would’ve come closer to the novel’s original spirit and zeitgeist and thus seemed more culturally significant and exciting—provided that the filmmakers/studios didn’t miss the mark, as one can all too easily imagine them doing in those periods. Although Salles proves one can make a watchable (entertaining, even) film out of On The Road, in this day and age, it just doesn’t seem relevant—more like a museum piece than a credible summation of how the culture got to where it is now (or where it’s heading). 3.5 cats”