FILM: On the Road
DIRECTOR: Walter Salles
TOWERS: 3 out of 5
For most, a rite of passage into artistic “adulthood” is saying you’ve been able to experience the free-flow tome “On the Road” from beat generation pioneer Jack Kerouac. This dynamic poet and iconoclast author helped fuse the modern day world of literature and the spoken word, open-minded thinking that was finding a voice in the culture of the mid-twentieth century. The idea of rejecting standards set by a country torn from the Great Depression and two World Wars was unheard of, but to couple that with the experimentation of sex and drugs was almost unthinkable in the 40s and 50s of America. Beat literature helped celebrate that, in written terms that could publicize the underground movement that was sweeping the U.S. while calling out the artistic results of those deciding to take that course like William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and its main man Jack did, with aplomb.
Kerouac took all of that self-defined hedonism of postwar youth society and delivered it in that unflinching book. Walter Salles as a director, who dazzled with films like “Motorcycle Diaries,” decided to take the charge of bringing this to film. The result is beautiful one: with a travelogue of shots of motorway travel from the vantage point of the passenger window. Whether it is Mexico, New York, San Francisco, Louisiana, Nebraska, there’s always a view. With that view is a smart set of land markers in the current set of acting pedigree. Whether its Viggo Mortensen, in the fatherly drug-addled role of Burroughs as Old-Bull Lee, Kirsten Dunst giving striking longing and sadness as Carolyn Cassady in the role of Camille or Tom Sturridge as the wide-eyed and bitterly understanding Carlo who nods to Allen Ginsberg, each helps punch a certain part of the wild ride ON THE ROAD tries to capture in a couple hours. It is not an easy trip to go on. There is so much that could have or did get captured from the original pages to expect, that thinking it all to play out on the final product would have been too much to even try to contemplate in the offering.
What results is a travelogue of strong moments in bad decisions, scenic surroundings and powerful bonds that carry you through the film. If it was all sensory than much of this film would be a winner but without truly taking the time to read its jazz-tinged, free-for-all source code, its hard to understand why this all came to the screen. But carrying that knowledge with you into the result as a film makes you give a quality nod to what is seen and satiate that morning after feeling to look back, appreciate the effort and burn, burn, burn like roman candles in the night of the dark of the movie theater you are in.
