On the Road

Walter Salles – 2012 – USA

As a fan of Jack Kerouac’s novel since high school, I was skeptical about any possible movie adaptation.  I suppose Walter Salles is as good a choice of director as anyone, assuming that a strict interpretation was necessary; Salles having done The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), another film set in the early 50s about an existential odyssey.  Luckily, the book is more about emotions than an episodic plot, and therefore Salles was able to focus on idiosyncratic moments and characters than on trying to re-trace the book exactly.  Garrett Hedlund gives an admirable performance as Dean Moriarty, the character based on Neal Cassady; the muse of key Beat writers like Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and the embodiment of burning one’s candle at both ends.  There is a basic problem in such a treatment that might be unsolvable.  On one hand, if you are too reverential and period-oriented, the film could end up stale as a Masterpiece Theater episode, or a Twilight film.  On the other hand, if you play everything as low-key and realistic as possible, we can start to wonder what was so remarkable about these characters and events that warranted a novel by Kerouac in the first place.  The latter is the path that Salles chose, and even though it works fine, I don’t think I would’ve been very impressed or interested if I didn’t already know the novel.  However, I certainly admired the fact that Cassady is critiqued as much as celebrated; a weaker film would likely have set him up as the prototype of all free spirits, but we also see the toll that his lifestyle takes on him and those around him.  Even Sal Paradise (the Kerouac character) tires of it in the end.

(One minor gripe: Allen Ginsberg was a great poet but definitely no matinee idol; in fact he was famously homely and owlish and not athletic at all.  And yet he’s been portrayed in three different movies in the past few years by James Franco, Daniel Radcliffe and here by Tom Sturridge, all of whom are pretty handsome guys, I think it’s fair to say.  It just seems distracting and strange in an era that claims to prize realism above almost all else.  Somebody who looks more like Patton Oswalt or Paul Giamatti should be playing Ginsberg; not Tom Sturridge.)