Movie Review for "On The Road"

On the Road

A film adaptation of a beat classic.

Some people say that great literature adaptations will not necessarily be converted into great cinema. When published in 1957, the novel On The Road by Jack Kerouac was received enthusiastically by critics. "Its publication is a historic occasion in so far as the exposure of an authentic work of art is of any great moment in an age in which the attention is fragmented and the sensibilities are blunted by the superlatives of fashion," wrote Gilbert Millstein for The New York Times at the moment of its release. Actually, its time is the post-war baby-boom, the American cultural hegemony through the occident, the prospect of a new era of libertarianism, liberalism and prosperity. On the Road is a visionary work of literature, a seminal novel that captures with sharp authenticity the rising of the juvenile as the main figure of popular culture, thirsty for renewal and a new way of life apart from the recent global tragedy. Therefore, it stands both as the modern epic of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, an Odyssey that defines the twentieth century, but also as a fresh literary form, as the mad narrative flow of Kerouac demonstrates.

It is a direct descendant of the canonical tradition of American literature of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, to portray what was the so called “lost generation”, but there is a great influence of writers such as James Joyce and William Faulkner to transpose into words and free meter stream of consciousness narrative, although still finding sources in European authors such as Arthur Rimbaud and Marcel Proust, making use of stylistic features as the poetic prose and involuntary memory, respectively. What made the book so acclaimed, is also what motivate its detractors - "That is not wrighting; it's typewrighting ", once said Truman Capote. On the Road is one of the most representative novels of the past century, it goes from psychoanalysis to psychedelia, the decay of tonal tradition from classical to freedom of bebop, the hardbop, free jazz... musical rituals would give rise to rock and roll as well.

Therefore, adding to the historical influence of the book, there is the rough idea of the immense difficulty of adapting a book of this stature to a feature film. There is a journey through America, the constant comings and goings, unimaginable situations on the roads, but also there is the narrative style, structural transgression, rupture, forty meters prose-spaced with no paragraph, written by an author who, taking amphetamines, was typing fourteen thousand words fourteen hours per day.

Brazilian director Walter Salles had an enormous challenge when invited to adapt to the language of cinema that literal poetic narrative. The choice of this specific director by the producers and the studio was determined by several reasons. He had experiences on directing good pictures such as the Brazilian Oscar nominated Central Station (Central do Brasil, 1998) and The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), where he gained experience working on road movies, films on which the territorial journey is the path of self-knowledge, the finding of identity, life from the perspective of absence the father, the melancholy man's link with his creator. It's a look of a stranger on a north-american kind of reality - Kerouac offers the marginal view of society which he himself belonged, as well as other writers from beat generation (the term beatnik mentions the Russian satellite Sputnik). And for the producers, Salles is a filmmaker of the whole American continent, a Brazilian from the generation of City of God (2002), regarded by the nervous and instable camera movement, the uneasy look and frantic editing. Behind the film production is Francis Ford Coppola, who like David Lynch, is also obsessed for the cultural moment of the fifties, and actually since the 70’s he is involved with projects that orbit around the youth of that particular Era - as in American Graffiti (1973), Rumble Fish (1983) and Peggy Sue Got Married, (1986), and even in the recent autobiographical Tetro (2009).

The choice of actors was also very accurate. They came from past movies that were indirectly related to the book’s themes, or under its influence in a certain way. Sam Riley, who performs the alter ego of the writer, Sal Paradise, starred Control (idem, 2007), living the self-destructive rock star Ian Curtis, leader of Joy Division. Kristen Stewart is perfect as Marylou - the actress had a turning point in her career precisely in Into the Wild (2007). And the young Garret Hedlund fits perfectly to the character of Dean Moriarty, with all his brutality, virility, mixed with a sensitivity personality and tenderness.

On the Road (2012) is faithful to the book. Its burden is the caliber and the relevance of the novel, never inseparable, never forgotten. And the film is very competent to implement many drug use scenes without being self-indulgent, or turning it into a simple meaningless celebration, or a frivolous look on hallucinogens consumption. The film show many sex scenes, but never in a gratuitousness way, as sometimes it happens in other movies - as in Brazilian Paraísos Artificiais (2012), a recent example. It is based on one of the most cool and detached references of modern pop culture, but luckily it does not demonstrate an indie/hipster look, its focus is not on the ongoing aesthetic culture of teenagers, of fads, it is not fulfilled with self-reverences, when the director wants to be seen more than the movie itself - which probably would have happened if this project had fallen into the wrong hands.

Another virtue of Salles is because the film is not supported by voice-overs all the time. Usually the sacredness of the original text ends up underestimating the ability of the language of cinema itself to tell the story with the right shots and angles, with camera movement, editing, lights, sounds - an example of this type of mistake in the Brazilian cinema is found in Lavoura Arcaica (2001), a movie by Luiz Fernando Carvalho. Beside the fact he actually is a great talented director (and this film does have its particular beauty), in this case the public seems to be watching a narrated movie, being explained and justified by a undesirable voice over all the time. There are, of course, much worse examples. Salles chooses to respect and trust in the capacity of the audience, when he skillfully makes a cut from a shot framing the scroll on a typewriter to another shot with the horizon showing the track of a road. When, in the dialogues, he does not add in the dialogues the characters thoughts and disillusions, but simply focus on the facial reactions of the actors as they listen to traditional tonal music, or when they are ironically repeating President Truman’s speech, the one he says he must cut down on the cost of living. It does not offer easy explanations to what is exposed - life is what it is.

The narrative is sustained by a floating camera, by baffling cuts and flashbacks according to the rhetoric of the original novel, but still there is the classical cinema atmosphere, the aura of the golden age, wide shots of landscapes, the wild and native America, viewed through the lens of an unstable camera, following the tension around characters relationships. The jazz soundtrack, the bebop, the unsteady beat on drums à la Gene Krupa punctuate the movie flow, but Salles never makes the soundtrack an attribute to prefabricate emotions, or to give to the film a boring music video look.

On the Road, unlike the book, was not welcomed with hype at its premiere – as shown at the Cannes Festival in 2012. It will not have the historical significance of the original book. Nor inspire new generations to leave home, or to explore life intensely. Never a demerit or a fault from the director or the producers or of the film itself, by the way. This is perhaps this movie greatest virtue - no concessions in order to make it something pleasing to a generation that is much more into the narcissistic paranoia and mass hysteria of The Social Network (2010) than to the rebellion and restlessness of Rebel Without a Cause (1955). On the Road goes against the flow as Jack Kerouac did.