***Off The Road With On The Road- A Film Review-Take Three

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

DVD Review

On The Road, starring, Sam Riley, Garret Hedlund, Kristie Stewart, based on the be-bop Beat Generation novel by Jeanbon Kerouac, IFC Film, 2012

We will always have memories of blasted out Frisco town in the late 1940s, out on the Left Coast supplementing the Village in New York City and damn few other places as refuge, ready to take refugees, car-borne refugees, foot-sore hitchhikers, droused Greyhound bus denizens, coming in from the cold war red scare Denver/Chi Town/Jersey Shore/Village/Lowell/Hullsville American dreaded night. Drawing the restless, the bohemian (quaint word), the hapless, those ready to remake themselves as the alienated, aloof, alone, getting ready to make due in that small oasis once Denver, Lowell, Paterson, Saint Louis lost their hold on the imaginations of a generation that grew to manhood (and womanhood but this story, this story for what it is worth is driven by young male angst)the Great Depression but were not deformed by it, were not Jack Kerouac’s beaten down fellahin, but beat, beatified (not like in the high Catholic sense but more like some latter day liberation theology, the meek of the earth, the downtrodden). Those who would join the alienated bikers romping and stomping out of Oakland and the East Bay, the LaJolla “perfect wave” surfer boys plus their dry land surfer girls waiting, the be-bop hot rod speedster out in places like Modesto, and assorted rebels without a cause, to fall under the radar of what was the great American freeze out. Frozen out, left adrift, let dangle to come roaring back in the misbegotten angel streets of the 1960s.

We will always have Jack Kerouac’s novel, On The Road, that sent one, maybe two generations, on the road, on the road to some mystical discovery thing, to some search for language to explain our short existence, to make sense of things in the modern world that has no time for reflection on the big cosmic questions. Weary feet, rain bedraggled, sun-blistered, snow-drifted hitchhikes and speed demon cross-country traveler’s aid shared rides roads to sort out things in good time (but what do youth today of free rides and hard times thumb out against a misunderstanding world). To write, smoke, drink, ball, sulk, speed the road to, yes, the road to… Waiting in some Fresno hot field, some Steamboat Junction cross-road, some Winnemucca small town bus depot bench that day’s new paper rolled up for a bed, some Neola cornfield seeking bracero stoop labor to keep heading west, always west, or worst dumped in Moline at midnight with the damn town shut down. Hard times no question in that quest for, ah, truth, or a truth, or just to keep the music in one’s head moving.

We will always have Kerouac’s finely wrought be-bop word plays jumping off the page (cranking out a million words on benny, goof balls, at three in the morning) out in the desolate 1950s a chicken in every pot and two cars (if not three) cars in every garage, in every leafy suburban ranch house sub-division garage. We will always have Sal (a.k.a Jeanbon Kerouac late of working- class kid mill town Lowell, local football hero, lady’s man about town, good fellow well met, ready to break out at almost any price) and Dean, Dean Moriarty (a.k.a. Neal Cassady late of Denver reformatories and ready to break, break into any machine that moves, and maybe some that don’t), the father we did not know, those of who came later could not know, while we were sitting on those Jersey shores, sweating out in those Ames cornfields, hell, even sitting on the seawall down in those old Hullsville beach fronts looking for the great blue-pink great American West night.

We will always have Charlie, Sonny, Slim, Big Red, the Duke, Fatah, blowing out big brass, Johnny blowing out that big sassy, sexy sax, the Prez taking it up a notch, blowing it out into, what did Ginsberg call them, oh yeah, those negro streets, the street of the hipsters, even of those Mailer dissipated white hipsters trying to figure out what the black guys were up to. Trying to reach and sometimes making it, that high white note, that moment when they were one with the instrument, hell, it could have been a kazoo, when they went mano y mano with the sublime. After hours, of course, after the paying customers, the carriage trade, went home to bed and they blew to heaven, or tried to, with the boys, with the guys who knew exactly when that note floated out some funky cellar bar door winding its way down to the harbor.

We will always have Sal, Carlos, Bull, Dean and an ever changing assortment of , well, women, women, mainly, like I say, at their beck and call, riding, car-riding, riding hard over the hill and dale of this continent searching, well, just searching okay. We will always have the lost brothers, Sal and Dean, playing off of each other’s strengths (and weaknesses) as they try to make sense of their world, or if not sense then to keep high, keep moving, and keep listening. And we will always have a great American novel to pass on to the next wanderlust generation, if there is another wanderlust generation.

And that is exactly what is wrong with this long time in the making film adaptation of Kerouac’s cultural coming- of- age novel. I looked forward with great anticipation to the film, and came away with a fair- sized disappointment. Not with the main actors, Sam Riley, Garret Hedlund and Kristie Stewart since they were confined by the way the director (and screen-writers) wanted to play the novel. Take away the drugs, sex, rock and roll (oops, be-bop jazz), and, oh yeah, driving at high speed and/or hitchhiking, and there is no glue holding this thing together.

Now no one can deny, or such denials will go for naught after watching this film, that Kerouac was, frankly very oblique in his sexual references, and certainly in the amount of time he spent on discussing the ins and out of sex in the novel so it was quite disconcerting to find so much time spent on the sex scenes. Kerouac had that Gallic (and Irish) Catholic reticence (think of his small novel, Maggie Cassidy) to speak plainly of the“s” word except by implication, and that aspect of his adventures is not what drove us to imitate the “beats” (we already were a step, no half a step ahead, of the previous generation in that regard although still woefully ignorant when it came right down to it). Moreover, let’s face it women for the men, and it was mainly men, of the Beat generation women were ornaments, or drudges. While it does no good to project today’s mores backward they were kept around because as Dean/Neal shouted out one time “I love women.” End of story. Ms. Stewart is too much the post-1960s woman, thankfully, to be the essentially anonymous plaything of the novel.

While Road is not strictly a buddy adventure film I came out after watching the film thinking that maybe, just, maybe, it is impossible to put this novel in cinematic form, there is perhaps too much stream of consciousness, too much introspection, too much angst to corral on film, a 2012 sensibilities film anyway. We will however always have the novel, praise be.