It's
generally considered a truism that great novels tend to make indifferent films,
and it's not difficult to see why. The denser and more highly-wrought a textual
narrative, the less amenable it is to a single, exclusively visual
interpretation. Conversely, the greater a story's reliance on non-allusive,
unreflective action, the more chance it has of translating directly to the
screen. Those few major novels which have also made seriously good films
without exception required screenwriter and director to reimagine both original
text and their own respective arts to create something different from, but in
some way equivalent to the original.
I doubt that anyone these days would
seriously challenge the status of "On The Road" as a great novel. It
revolutionised English prose, articulated an identifiably American sensibility
that was reaching for the universal, and extended an existing literary
tradition or two, at the same time as
laying the ground for much subsequent experimentation in literary, poetic, and
journalistic writing. It is also one of those rare books which literally does
change lives. So in attempting to film it, Walter Salles must have known he was
setting himself up to fail quite badly in the eyes of those hundreds of thousands, maybe
millions, of people who know, love, and have their own complex and multifaceted
response to Kerouac's 1950s masterpiece.
Salles opts wisely to begin by
placing “On the Road” firmly in the tradition of Kerouac's acknowledged
forebears, those painters of continental restlessness Thomas Wolfe & John
Steinbeck. The instant ability of film to reveal landscape and the
configurations of people framing and inhabiting it , combined with the use of
hobo folk song as a soundtrack to rapidly-cut scenes of cross-country travel, delivers a depth of
historic backstory with an economy a novelist might envy. Claustrophobic,
scruffy domestic interiors and dull urban lots are set against this Great
Outdoors of light and weather. And as Sal Paradise, Kerouac's surrogate, Sam
Riley in voiceover sounds convincingly worldweary in a way only a very young
person can. It's a great set-up.
In narrative terms, Salles has evidently tried to remain as
faithful as possible to the overall structure of Kerouac’s novel, while teasing
out certain themes and implications that were dormant – even unacknowledged –
in the original published version of 1957.
Some of these, notably the strong homoerotic bond between Sal, Dean Moriarty,
and Carlo Marx, were present in the legendary manuscript ‘scroll’ from which
this was culled, finally published in its entirety 50 years later. More
interestingly, though, the automatic 1940s misogyny of the male dramatis personae, of which even Keroauc
was probably blithely unaware as he wrote, is cleverly counterpointed by the
building-up into characters of some of the women, who feature as little more
than sketches in either version of his text. Kristen Stewart – hitherto best
known for the clunking, bloodless vampire Bella in the Twilight films – demonstrates astonishingly that she can actually
act, putting in a finely-tuned performance as Dean’s sexually-exploited and
emotionally-abused teenage wife Marylou. As Dean’s other marital
partner-cum-victim Camille, Kirsten Dunst is given a couple of extra scenes to
demonstrate the frustration and anger of being a female foil to the glorified
adolescent male-bonding culture unthinkingly celebrated by Kerouac. It’s a
thoughtful and effective call. In one of those moments where film can offer an
instant insight that might take a novelist hundreds of words to lay out, Sal
and Dean toast “The old men and the West” above the sleeping, ignored body of
Marylou.
Garrett Hedlund’s Dean, monster of egotism though he is,
retains the seductiveness and charm which undoubtedly motivated Kerouac to
centre On the Road around his
original, Neal Cassady. Hedlund’s laconic,
Midwestern delivery carries off dialogue
I’ve always thought might sound slightly
arch, even hysterical, if spoken aloud. Also, for a character written so much
larger-than-life, he augments this with a subtle range of facial expression,
emphasised in the shaky close-up of certain intimate, interior scenes between
Dean, Sal, Carlo, and the occasional disposable woman. Tom Sturridge’s longsuffering Carlo
personifies the undercurrent of sexual frustration, undeclarable love, & jealousy of Dean which Kerouac himself
persistently refuses to acknowledge, except indirectly. It is also a convincing
and endearing portrait of a young Allen Ginsberg.
Perhaps the main philosophical strand in On the Road is one which Kerouac’s later
interest in Buddhism would more fully explore, that of the busyness of everyday
life and its corollary in eternity – stasis, silence, the Void. A fear of
placelessness, and the endless, contradictory putting of oneself in different
places in order to try and avoid this, is periodically revisited in Salles’s
film, as in Kerouac’s book. There is a
recurring quotation from Proust, and the melancholy visualisation of lonely Midwestern small towns at sunset, seen
from hotel rooms where you know neither where nor who you are.
If, then, a film had to be made of On the Road, this one will do very well. It respects the text,
while refusing to collude with some of the more obvious elisions engaged in by
the author. It also manages to strike a realistic balance between the
romanticism of youthful restlessness – which I think is something most of us
fall for the first time we read Kerouac – and the more squalid, selfish side of
those characters for whom we have fallen. It even allows itself the obvious
metaphor, in its closing sequences, of envisaging the ribbon of paper on which
Kerouac typed his first draft – the legendary ‘scroll’ – as The Road itself. But
since that’s one that the author himself invented (“rolled it out on floor and
it looks like a road” he said in a letter to Cassady in 1951) it’s probably
still OK.
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