On the Road – review
Years in the making, Walter Salles's movie adaptation of Kerouac's beat classic is bold, affecting and inherently sad
Sam Riley, left, and Garrett Hedlund as Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty in On the Road.
The first two books I bought when I arrived in New York as a graduate student in August 1957 were William H Whyte's The Organization Manand a special edition of the avant-garde quarterly Evergreen Review on the "San Francisco scene". They complemented each other. Whyte's book is a devastating assault on American conformity by a senior editor of the business magazine Fortune. The Evergreen special was a celebration of the countercultural artists soon to be famous as leaders of the beat generation, and the writers featured as members of the San Francisco scene were Allen Ginsberg, whose poem "Howl" was published earlier that year, and Jack Kerouac, whose On the Road was to be the literary sensation of 1957 when it appeared a month or so later.
During that autumn my principal term paper for a class on magazine writing at Indiana University's journalism school was called "The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men", contrasting the revolutionary cultural movements on either side of the Atlantic:Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, John Osborne'sLook Back in Anger and Colin Wilson's The Outsider up against "Howl" and On the Road. They were all reacting against hollow, regimented postwar societies, but as I recall it I found the American writers altogether more positive, expansive and ebullient than their bitter British contemporaries.
These memories are prompted, of course, by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's film version of "Howl", which opened here last year, and the Brazilian Walter Salles's bold, faithful adaptation of On the Road, some five years or more in preparation. Salles made a fine film in 2004 of The Motorcycle Diaries, Che Guevara's account of discovering his native continent and finding himself while travelling around Latin America with an Argentinian friend. This can be seen as preparation for the larger task of bringing to the screen Kerouac's autobiographical novel of crisscrossing the United States in battered cars, by bus or hitchhiking in the years immediately after the second world war, constantly meeting up with the charismatic Neal Cassady. A hard-living, yea-saying individualist, Cassady is an extreme egotist, constantly on the move, who exploits the women around him. Kerouac, who figures in the novel as Sal Paradise (Sam Riley), is a shy, academically inclined 25-year-old in 1947 when he and Cassady, called Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund) in the book, meet and agree to tutor each other. Sal becomes Dean's literary mentor; Dean instructs introvert Sal in the liberated beat existence of sex and drugs and bebop.
In addition to being a Bildungsroman about Kerouac/Paradise's own development as man and writer, On the Road is about the creation of a new literary wave, the soubriquet "beat generation" obviously echoing "lost generation", the title Gertrude Stein bestowed on Hemingway, Fitzgerald and their expatriate comrades in arms after the first world war. So the novel and film also feature Allen Ginsberg, thinly disguised as the bearded, bespectacled Carlo Marx (Tom Sturridge), and William Burroughs (played by Viggo Mortensen) figures as Old Bull Lee. In a brilliant cameo, Mortensen gets Burroughs's flat, wry voice exactly right as he denounces Moriarty as psychotic, exposes how the English translation of Voyage au bout de la nuit bowdlerises Céline's original, and hilariously demonstrates his version of Wilhelm Reich's ludicrous, once fashionable orgone boxes for the control of psychic energy.
Back in 1980, John Byrum made Heart Beat, an interesting, highly romantic movie about the triangular relationship between Kerouac (John Heard), Cassady (Nick Nolte) and Cassady's first wife, Carolyn (Sissy Spacek). It had an outsize performance by Nolte (with echoes of Anthony Quinn's Zorba) and a visual style that resembled, and at certain points recreated, paintings by Edward Hopper. Salles's film is much harsher visually, and often as not he shows the itinerant life – winter on the road, life in seedy hotels, badly paid casual work – as no better than it was for the unemployed back in the 1930s. Salles is also more critical than the novel is of Moriarty's casually exploitative attitude to women, and by assembling a remarkable cast – Kristen Stewart, Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams, Elisabeth Moss – he gives far greater depth and substance to Kerouac's thinly conceived female characters. The overall effect, however, is to make Moriarty a far less attractive figure than he is when seen exclusively from Kerouac's point of view.
Salles and his screenwriter José Rivera give shape to what many have seen – wrongly I think – as a rambling, incoherent narrative. They make powerfully affecting the final break between a dispirited Moriarty, who meets up with a newly confident, smartly dressed Sal Paradise just off to a Duke Ellington concert at the Metropolitan Opera. And they create a striking image of the tearing in two of a photograph taken in a Greyhound station booth of Sal, Dean and Carlo as they split up early on. This picture is eventually restored when Sal sets about writing the novel that he has spent five years living. There he is at last with the seemingly endless scroll of paper that will allow him to type uninterrupted using the new mode of "spontaneous bop prosody" he's created. (The scroll, now a revered historical object, is currently on show at the British Library.) But this is ultimately a rather sad film, as most road movies are, because the restless travelling life can never bring peace and contentment. Arguably the finest example of the genre, Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop, ends with the film burning up inside the projector and uses as its leitmotif the refrain from Me and Bobby McGee, Kris Kristofferson's great song about life on the road: "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."
La libertad y el estrellato...
ResponderEliminarFreedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.
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