This is a Festival response to On the Road (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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12 October
This is a Festival response to On the Road (2012)
* Contains spoilers *
Two admissions, which ruin my credibility forever:
(1) I declined the opportunity to see The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) because I had no wish to follow the journeys of an early Che - he could have been an early Woody Allen and it would have made no difference to the fact that, if I want a travel documentary (in the case of somewhere where I am not going to go), I will watch Michael Palin's antics, and I see the concept of a film rather differently. (As I did not see the film, obviously I do not know for sure what I missed. Accepted.)
(2) I have never read On the Road (let alone any of Kerouac's other writings), though, when I decided to get around reviewing the film, which a friend and I saw, largely through his desire to do so, at Cambridge Film Festival, I looked out my copy of it. Therefore, anything that I find to quote from it will be just that - a phrase or passage that I find when flicking through it.
I also have some insights about Jack K. from my friend, who has read it and more, namely the close identity between the narrators of these works and JK himself.
As the credits for On the Road (2012) tell you, scenery through which we are supposed to be following various travellers on various journeys is nowhere near where it was shot, but in another part of the States (or of Canada). Yes, unconvincingly London passes for Paris in the dire Bel Ami (2012) (quite apart from what we see in The Third Man (1949) or Amadeus (1984)), but that almost makes sense - we can have a sense of the monumentality or grandeur of parts of Paris, even if we are not seeing them.
Certainly, they must have had reason, in this film, not to show the territories surrounding, say, Louisiana (to and from which we journey), but isn't the entreprise a bit hollow if whatever they do show has nothing to do with those places? I start with this point because, if one cannot say Great panoramas - I must go and see them myself some day, we are 'forced back' on the characters, and I honestly do not think that their desires and changes of heart run to a whole two hours 17 minutes worth of interest, but maybe 90 (with less need to show shots that were really somewhere quite different - I do not think that the list bore any relation to what we thought that we were shown).
OK, my thesis is this - it's a nice safe bet to film some version of a well-known, successful book, because people have been satisfied enough with how it is put together working to have read it approvingly. Nothing new there, but, if one's choice lands on something that, to be done justice to, has to sprawl so much and maybe be pretty lacking in any story, is that the ideal project, unless one has a big shake-up with the text and portrays it radically differently? Yes, that might upset an author's estate, or even fans at grass roots, but would it be a better film, maybe even be a film?
Given the acknowledged limitations, but in the light of talking to my friend and others as to whether the way that the text lies lends itself to taking it point for point as the basis for a film, what I have to ask (as I did) is what credibility Sal Paradise has, when we meet him, as a writer, or even simply what there is about him that would make someone, on pretty slight acquaintance, ask him to travel from New York to Denver to see him.
Now we know, after the event, that On the Road the book resulted from this and all the other travels, and, when Sam Riley (as Sal) starts hitching, we see him scribbling is his small but somehow infinite note-book (as if the guys on the back of the truck with him would not have been more than a little interested and been likely to have parted their company).
It may be little more than sexual when he is cotton picking, but there is even a sense that this Sal abandons his exteriority to his own experiences and actually feels them : frustrated though I was that I was being asked to believe in him as a writer when there had not even been so much as something being read aloud with his New York chums, I think that, by now, there might have been voiceover, maybe, of some of his writerly snippets (unless that only occurs later, when he actually starts writing, and he is reliving these moments).
Set against now, where, unless I wanted to be scenic about it, I would take a flight to make this first journey of Sal's, I would still be less than impressed with Dean Moriarity to have had impressed on me that I needed to make a trip whose basis and necessity turn out, in the ever-casual way of intoxication beyond the means of alcohol passing for the common currency of life, to have dissolved, so that, no sooner there and with no thought of where Sal might stay, Dean has to go to Los Angeles (or some such).
Just the first of a series of long, long journeys that seem to have the same capacity for their purpose to disappear more quickly than the destination can be reached. For me, none of it amounts to more than a few very blunt character traits and repressed feelings, which is where I arrive at a run-time around 90 minutes, because they do not merit more :
Sal is flattered by Dean's interest in him, and Dean, for his part, talks up this man who, if he did not resemble (a little) Scottish saxophonist Tommy Smith (whose talent I know and value), actually seems to possess no qualities to justify it. It is all sublimated through Dean arranging girls (including his own partner, at a key point) for Sal to sleep with, and then noisily doing so himself.
That holds true until (for money, and as he says to Sal he has done before) Dean has sex with the man who has been sedately driving them, and Sal witnesses it : not much guessing where his disgust with Dean and walking out on him at breakfast comes from. With a few twists and turns of sub-plots, and of Dean's various and far-flung women, that is pretty much the emotional core of all these lengthy wanderings, except that they always serve as a distraction from him ever knowing what on earth he wants, and all the signs, from how he chatted up Sal on first meeting, are that his own deeper desires from their 'relationship' (I only call it that because they virtually travel across the continent to say hello for ten minutes) are the same.
However, the film decides to swallow its own tail by having Sal write the book that we are viewing, with a roll of paper that he makes and feeds into the typewriter. Apparently such a roll does exist amongst JK's effects, though its status as being how he wrote the book might be suspect, but we get back to the bogus demonstration of creativity, as if there has to be this infinite roll of paper to receive the limitless notes that we saw scribbled before, and the white-hot power of the process is such that nothing, not even puttting in a new sheet of paper and keeping the finished ones in order, must be allowed to interrupt it. Believe that idea of writing if you like!
Clearly, things were taken from this film, but - from my position of majestic ignorance - I believe that a better film could have been made by taking the book as raw material, and not setting out depiction as if sacrosanct. And, blow me, I've still not opened the wretched text!
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