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Movie Review: On the Road (2012)

On the Road (2012)
Directed by Walter Salles
Screenplay by Jose Rivera
Based on the book by Jack Kerouac

The Beats have undergone a second revival in recent years, owing to the questioning and adventurousness of the current generation. With their glorification of the lower classes, drug use, and casting aside of social and sexual norms, the so-called Beat Writers serve as unwitting guides and mentors to a set of young people determined to toss out the rulebook and start over. Say what you want about Millenial motivations for seeking out these writers; the fascination remains deep and profound.

Unfortunately, the true meaning of Beatness has never adequately translated into film. Perhaps it is for the best that its essence is uncapturable, but Hollywood has proven particularly brain dead in its attempts - especially where writing, the main expression of Beatness, is concerned. Kill Your Darlings (John Krokidas, 2013) turned the events surrounding the murder of David Kammerer into a glamorous gay college-hijinks movie that seemed annoyed with the whole "writing" thing. While On the Road is at least a clear-eyed attempt at capturing this aspect of the Beat experience, it still falls far short.

First, the plot: following Jack Kerouac's quasi-autobiographical novel On the Road, the film follows blocked writer Sal Paradise on his cross-country journeys with the irrepressible, half-crazy Dean Moriarty. Sal is looking for something big, something American, something to write about; he finds all three in the bipolar, bisexual, small-time criminal "Natural Man" that is Dean. Falling in and out of their Hudson roadster (and Dean's bed) are the wild Marylou, lovesick poet Carlo Marx, and various drifters, bums, salesmen, and nogoodniks. The whole story is a drive between San Francisco and New York City (several times), a stopover in Denver, a visit with Old Bull Lee in Louisiana, and a side-trip to Mexico City. The main character, naturally, is The Road, and all that it represents - the wide-open and seemingly limitless expanse of America, and the ultimate letdown of every destination.

One thing On the Road gets right is America - the American landscape, huge as imagination and intimate as loneliness. Through Eric Gautier's lush cinematography, the visuals induce synaesthesia: you experience the electric cold of early winter, walking down the roadside past frozen fields; smell the musk of hay and old manure in a sun-warmed blowdown barn; feel the stillness of a day-glo sunrise somewhere on the plains. This America, the land, is the Beats. Its immensity and beauty and suffering blew the top off the skull of Kerouac in a way he struggled and ultimately despaired to articulate.

Music is another high point of the film - not its film score, but the scenes of performance and dancing. It is a sexual outlet, a release. From seizure-inducing jazz to the erotic frenzy of jitterbugging, the film jams us into the heaving crowd, forcing us to smell the sweat and sex and hormonal closeness of packed social halls and underground concerts. It's amusing to watch the characters, red-faced with frantic whiteboy flailings, as they desperately try to absorb the rhythms into their locked joints. In these sequences, aided by booze and pot and barbiturates, they finally touch the holy madness the film is always yammering about. The physicality of the actors, the ease with which they touch and kiss and tumble and screw, communicates the joy of the body, alive and not yet fettered by the tightening iron grip of the McCarthy Era. What is often forgotten about World War II is the social and sexual freedom it engendered: millions of young, horny men and women, on the move, far from home, experienced unimaginable new things - not just the horror of war, but Europe, the big city, the demimonde, and new ways of life and fashion. Just after Victory Day, before the Cold War sank its cold fangs into the American consciousness, there was a brief moment of limitless possibility among the young and rootless. The Beats didn't just pop up like mushrooms. They were gestated in the Depression, formed in the War Years, and exploded briefly in the Fifties - before the whole notion of Beatness was satirized, commercialized, sterilized, and forgotten. To On the Road's credit, it does not sidestep history for the sake of contemporary appeal - these were men and women of a different, harsher, sparer, more psychologically murky time.

Unfortunately, On the Road belies its own thesis: none of the characters come off as "mad" or "holy", and nobody "burns, burns, burns" to paraphrase Kerouac. The whole roaring road-trip, after the initial excitement, comes off as melancholy and a bit boring. It's weird than nobody end up sniping at each other about a wrong turn, or fighting over the radio. In an attempt at making Sal the "relatable" character, the outside observer, the movie glosses over his participation in the destructive mess that Dean leaves in his wake. Dean himself is just a sad deadbeat. This is no fault of Garrett Hedlund's performance - he's a gruff man-boy with a husky voice and a dangerous swagger, at once a born leader and a scruffy urchin. You even catch a whiff of madness, when he looms out of the backseat of the Hudson, blue eyes electric, teeth bared in either a shit-eating grin or a predatory leer...only to have him say something utterly innocuous. The film doggedly refuses to capture the pathology of Dean's character, or any of the characters for that matter. Instead it goes for a light psychological profile masquerading as a coming-of-age road story.

There are some good bits. Viggo Mortensen does a spot-on Burroughs impression as Old Bull Lee, holding court in his creepy Louisiana mansion; his wife Joan is played with vacant-eyed aplomb by Amy Adams, beating (imaginary?) lizards out of the bushes with a broom. The punchline of their visit has Bull peering out from his Orgone Accumulator as Dean observes, "Looks like a closet". Cue groans. 

Ultimately though, On the Road is just too flat for a story about the Beats. It insists on the madness of its characters without making any effort to prove the point, and ends up making what is supposed to be a joyous ode to freedom into a dirge to melancholy and dysfunction. By the time Sal sits down to start writing about his experiences, you're left wondering what all the fuss was about.

Final Verdict: 2 out of 5.

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