On the Road Reviews

(Mu) Salles takes too much time, and laousy non lineal narration, to reach the characters and hoy they hit or are hit on the road. Once in the car with Mama, or in Lusiana, naked in Arizona, Mad in Mexico, sad in Denver, the film camen closer to honour Kerouac

It is rather surprising that it took them so long to finally adapt this seminal US classic and when I heard that Walter Salles was directing, it sounded really promising but, when it was released, it was rather poorly received. I still wanted to check it out though. Eventually, even though it was a decent attempt, the whole thing was indeed still rather disappointing. I mean, it did look pretty good and there was a rather impressive cast (Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart, Amy Adams, Tom Sturridge, Alice Braga, Kirsten Dunst, Viggo Mortensen, Steve Buscemi) but, unfortunately, the whole thing felt rather flat. Indeed, their way of life, this neverending journey was supposed to be fascinating and full of excitement but, while watching this, I couldn't help thinking that it seemed rather pointless. I also thought that Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund were rather miscast. Indeed, in this adaptation, I thought that Sal Paradise was pretty much a wimp and Dean Moriarty an underwhelming gigolo. Those people should have been amazingly deep and smart, especially Moriarty who was supposedly the muse of the whole beatnik generation, but they sounded more or less like some rambling junkies/alcoholics. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, it remains an intriguing story and I still think it is worth a look but they could have done so much better with this material.

Sal and Dean and Marylou are ready to go On the Road and the asphalt beckons, but the screen refuses to ride along.


It’s been ever thus with Jack Kerouac’s epochal tome of restless youth. There’s been talk of a film version of On the Road right from the 1957 debut of this Beat Generation classic, including a movie that Kerouac hoped to make starring himself and Marlon Brando.


Brazil’s Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) gets closer than anyone ever has — and not just for the simple reason that he actually got a movie made, after decades of failed attempts by others.


With Sam Riley playing wandering writer Sal Paradise (Kerouac’s surrogate), Garrett Hedlund as his wild man accomplice Dean Moriarty and Kristen Stewart as their femme foil Marylou, Salles and screenwriter José Rivera really get all the madness & sadness & angels along the road to enlightenment.


The film is a handsomely photographed and competently cast work that does justice to Kerouac’s concept of “the purity of the road.” Yet there’s still something maddeningly lacking about it.


I admit to personal confusion and gear-shifting. I liked the film when it premiered at Cannes 2012, but a more recent viewing (after Salles trimmed some 15 minutes in running time) left me feeling considerably cooler to it.


It’s one of those regrettable situations, I think, where the movie is too faithful to the book. In seeking to bring the novel’s fragmented narrative and jazz-influenced dialogue to the screen, Salles and Rivera have somehow tamed it. We still recognize what we see, but we don’t feel it.


Initial excitement leads to ennui as a parade of characters dance before our eyes without making much of an impact.


Beginning in 1947 as shy writer Sal first encounters the mercurial Dean — a bisexual and Benzedrined ex-con described as “too busy for scruples” — the film moves from New York to San Francisco over and over, just like the book.


There are stops and digressions along the way as they engage with a conflicted poet named Carlo Marx (Tom Sturridge, actually playing Beat poet Allen Ginsberg), a “teacher” named Old Bull Lee (Viggo Mortensen, actually playing author William S. Burroughs), a sexy siren named Camille (Kirsten Dunst, actually playing Carolyn Cassady, second wife of Neal Cassady, the inspiration for Dean Moriarty).


On it rolls, over and over, with these and other pseudonymous pals doing all the sex & drugs & all that jazz in ways that shocked the squares of the 1950s, but that today seem slightly more reality show than rebellious.


This is not to sell the effort short. Salles and Rivera deserve credit for not trying to make Sal and Dean seem like the saints. The film doesn’t sanitize how Sal and Dean treat the women in their lives, which by today’s standards would be considered flat-out abuse. Dean shares his teen bride Marylou with Sal while also being unfaithful to her and to Camille, who was his mistress before becoming his second wife.


A moving picture of On the Road should theoretically be able to lift the manic energy from the page to the screen, yet it paradoxically fails to do so. We hear some of Kerouac’s famous phrases — such as the invocation that begins, “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live” — but they only serve to make us want to return to the book, not to see the movie through to its anticlimactic ending.