On The Road Review

Director: Walter Salles

Starring: Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart, Kirsten Dunst, Viggo Mortensen

Running time: 137 minutes

Certificate: TBC

Synopsis: Sal (Riley) meets Dean (Hedlund), and their lives will forever be entwined as they experience girls, drugs, and life on the road…

‘Unfilmable, old chap… 100% unfilmable,’ is possibly what studio heads have said in the past every time an aspiring director has pitched an adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s novel ‘On the Road’. First published in 1957, the story follows Sal Paradise, who, shortly after the death of his father, meets Dean Moriarty. Together they share a brotherly relationship based on love and adulation, and travel the US in the hope of finding ‘it’. Executive producer Francis Ford Coppola and director Walter Salles bring the semi-autobiographical tale to life in a film over 50 years in the making. But were the studio heads right all along?

Visually, Salles’ ON THE ROAD is a thing of beauty. Eric Gautier’s cinematography is a wonder to behold: the colouring, the tracking of the characters, and the close quarters filming take the audience to Denver, New York and San Francisco like never before. The images conjured by Kerouac’s words come to life in a way never thought possible. But whilst it looks ravishing the film is full of problems, the first of which is a glaring problem: Hedlund is not Dean Moriarty. Yes, he has the charisma but the manic gesticulation, the darting eyes, and the constant jabber are all missing; Salles and Francois Gedigier were always going to struggle piecing together Sal and Dean’s story, but too many corners have been cut by the hideous editing. For example, Sal’s relationship with Terry is washed over in five minutes, ignoring her father’s lack of acceptance and the implications this has on Sal’s psyche. Instead, the film portrays Sal as a hollow individual, only interested in getting high and worshipping at Dean’s feet when, in the source material, nothing could be further from the truth.

Salles’ previous forray into the unfilmable was THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES, which is everything ON THE ROAD is not. The tale of the young Che Guevara is subtle and warm, with likeable characters coursing through its veins. Quite the opposite happens here – ON THE ROAD’s lack of character development unwittingly makes its main players quite repulsive: Sal is weak and little more than Dean’s bitch, Dean himself is a womanising druggie with a heinous ego, and Mary Lou (Stewart) is a little girl who just loves to fornicate. Whilst this is true for the first part of the novel, the change in her character is largely ignored. Also, Ed Dunkel as Morgan is criminally underused, the light relief so desperately needed in this serious, misogynistic, ill-judged tale. More development of characters across the board may also have helped the messy narrative; jumping forward too often, the story doesn’t allow the viewer to relate, and as such, the film falls apart an hour into the running time and never recovers. It isn’t all bad though – in addition to looking fantastic, the film is full of good performances. Riley, Stewart, Dunst and Morgan are all brilliant, but Viggo Mortensen as Old Bull Lee steals the film, despite only ten minutes screen-time. The music is perfect too, and keeps the cars rolling down the road nicely.

ON THE ROAD is an engrossing piece of literature that demands and holds your attention – the movie does neither. Salles, Coppola, and screenwriter Jose Rivera haven’t been able to translate 416 pages of brilliance into a coherent film, which is a great shame, particularly as the problems seem all the filmmakers’ own doing. Perhaps there is a longer cut that proves the opposite to be true, but for now ON THE ROAD does indeed appear to be unfilmable.

 ON THE ROAD is released in cinemas 15th October