On the road, yet stalled

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Walter Salles's film On The Road, an adaptation of Jack Kerouac's phenomenal book, receives a two thumbs down in the New York Review of Books.

Reviewer Andrew O' Hagan expresses disappointment at the film's tepid representation of the book's central ethos, that of a slightly camp-seeming social and sexual uplift that came in time to awaken the 1960s.

Walter Salles’s film of On the Road comes to us more than fifty years after the book’s publication. If the novel was a strange hybrid of the truth and its correction—sold to the world as “spontaneous bop prosody”—then the film takes us even deeper into the mysterious waters of veracity. This is a film of a novel that takes the form of a biography of an icon. It wouldn’t have been made this way in 1957, and, indeed, the story it tells is really the story of our own need, the need of modern audiences, to find reality much more interesting than fiction. The film cannot control its lust for the tang of actuality, forgetting what it takes to dream a prose narrative into being. Yes, Kerouac’s novel was very close to his life, but On the Road is really its prose. One might say the prose is the main character. How quickly it was written and under what conditions, who knows, any more than one can say what was really behind the tone of Charlie Parker when the sound came flowing out of his horn?

The film never finds a way to embody the sound. It just can’t hear it and so we watch a kind of beat soap opera, a play in which the visionary travails of the men can only be set against the domestic woes of the women. The rolling Whitmanesque parade and the singsong bebop amping on chords and words and phrases that makes the book what it is, none of this enters the film at the level of its pictures. We have a voiceover that gutters with a sense of low-watt destiny: the poets and their conversation just seem silly, the locations dreary, the women either sluts or drudges, women either bursting with enthusiasm to give out blow jobs in cars at high speed, or women standing with crying babies balanced on their hip.