MOVIE REVIEW
“On the Road”
Grade: B
Starring Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart and Kirsten Dunst. Directed by Walter Salles.
Rated R sexual situations, strong language and nudity. At Landmark Midtown. 2 hours, 4 minutes.
Bottom line: A wild ride
By Mick LaSalle
San Francisco Chronicle
The Walter Salles film “On the Road” is something of a sprawling mess, but then so is the novel. That was really the choice, to do Jack Kerouac’s book and end up with something rich but ragged, or not do the book and end up with something not worth doing at all. This time, a filmmaker decided to do the former and the result is a movie that, like the book, is episodic and has dips in energy but has more than its share of glory and illumination.
One of the great things the film does is capture the sense of actually being on the road, the relentless curving line of highway as seen through a windshield, the scenery rushing by on both sides. You get the bigness of the country and the freedom once available to people in those pre-cell phone days when you could still get away. You also get a sense of the era, and of the specialness of these Beat progenitors who, in ways better and worse, were a full 20 years ahead of their time.
These people were getting stoned and having casual affairs when the rest of the country was watching the Milton Berle show. They were listening to complicated jazz when “The Tennessee Waltz” was topping the charts. To escape convention so thoroughly is a rare thing, and though the Beat life gradually begins to look exhausting and ugly, it’s hard not to see the conventional world through their eyes, as populated by zombies.
The screenplay, by Jose Rivera, comes from three main sources. The principal one is Kerouac’s original novel, published in 1957. The second is the unedited draft of “On the Road” — Kerouac’s “original scroll” — which was published decades later. And the third source is the true history of Kerouac, Neal Cassady and LuAnne Henderson, the prototypes of Sal Paradise, Dean Moriarty and Mary Lou, respectively. In some places, the truth was even more extreme than anything Kerouac set down.
It begins in New York, where Dean (Garrett Hedlund) works parking cars — he’s a genius behind the wheel — and Sal (Sam Riley) is trying to be a writer. In Dean, Sal finds his subject. In a circle in which everyone is trying to be free, inspired and spontaneous, Dean is all those things naturally. He’s an occasional car thief, a former male prostitute and a man that even intelligent women seem to love on sight. Apparently, Neal Cassady was all those things in real life, though in the footage we have of him (taken years later) he seems like a bug-eyed motor-mouth. Rather than imitate the real Cassady, Hedlund takes the wiser course of making Dean’s allure plausible. So in “On the Road,” we get a Dean Moriarty who is mercurial, yet cool.
Soon, the men are taking off on the road — one of many trips — in which they are sometimes joined by Mary Lou, Dean’s teenage bride. Mary Lou is a womanly kid, oblivious yet observant, celebrated yet victimized, and Stewart’s casting in the role was no concession to box office. She has never been better. Camille (Kristen Dunst), the other important woman in Dean’s life is Mary Lou’s opposite — smarter, older, more self-respecting. But for all her intelligence and experience, she ends up no happier than Mary Lou.
Like the Romantic poets, the Beats led lives of bohemian glamour and freedom, but also like those Romantic poets, their freedom was made possible by the misery of their women, who were used and abandoned — in San Francisco, in Camille’s case, and who raised their children while they snorted Benzedrine and patted each other on the back. The brief but vivid appearance of Amy Adams as Joan Vollmer, the second wife of William S. Burroughs (Viggo Mortensen), emphasizes that message without words. A few years after the events of “On the Road,” Burroughs would kill Vollmer in a drunken game of “William Tell.”
It’s part of the movie’s honesty that what looks so fresh at the beginning of “On the Road” starts to look so tired and old by the end. That’s not a fault of the movie. That’s the point of it. As Carlo Marx — that is Allen Ginsberg — actor Tom Sturridge raves about embracing life, but soon you come to realize that everything coming out of his mouth is pretension and pompous idiocy, some new and amazing form of nonsense, as empty as the void.
Chalk it up to the price of winning the culture war. Your own lies are laid bare, and you become the cliché.
