6:49 p.m. | Updated CANNES, France — At one point in “On the Road,” Walter Salles’s respectable, muted take on Jack Kerouac’s ecstatic American story, Sal Paradise (Sam Riley), who’s trailed after his friends Carlo and Dean, watching them cavort in a handsomely lighted gutter and atmospheric slum pads, delivers what should be a cri de coeur. “The only people that interest me,” Sal says in voiceover, with Mr. Riley scatting out the famous words, “are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing…but burn, burn, burn like Roman candles across the night.” Yet these boys scarcely simmer.
“On the Road,” one of the most anticipated competition selections at the 65th Cannes Film Festival, had its press premiere Wednesday morning and was received with well-behaved applause, a low-pulse response for a low-pulse endeavor. Written by Jose Rivera, the script has been extracted from both the 1957 novel and the 1951 scroll version, so named because Kerouac pounded it out on 120 taped-together sheets of tracing paper. That version, published in 2007 as “On the Road: The Original,” uses real names like Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, which were changed for the novel to avoid libel charges. Some of the voiceover is taken right from the scroll: in the novel, for instance, Kerouac added “mad to be saved” to the qualities he ticked off in that brightly burning sentence.
More literary adaptation than biopic, the movie uses the fiction alter egos Kerouac created for the novel. Bookended by two goodbyes, the story spans 1947 to 1951, the year after Kerouac’s first published novel, “The Town and the City,” came out. “I first met Neal not long after my father died,” Sal says, delivering the scroll’s opening words, “I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk.” Sal meets Dean, a k a Cassady (Garrett Hedlund), through Carlo Marx, a k a Ginsberg, who’s played with energy and heavy glasses, by the pretty, deeply un-Ginsbergian British actor Tom Sturridge. Dean, as is his habit, throws open the door to Sal and Carlo while completely naked, his teenaged honeypot, Marylou (Kristen Stewart, fine and untwitchy), still warming the rumpled bed.
Arts & Leisure
The Beats Hit the Road Again on Screen
Walter Salles’s “On the Road” completes a kind of trinity of Beat classics adapted for the screen, following “Howl” and “Naked Lunch.”
From there it’s on the road and off as the beatific boys, with Marylou sometimes riding shotgun, discover America and themselves or try to anyway as the jazz wails and throbs amid insert shots of books by Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. Everything looks authentic or at least painstakingly researched, from the jazz clubs where Sal and Dean sweat and grind alongside the African-American clientele to the stores that hug the sides of the highways. The cinematographer Eric Gautier has done brilliant work elsewhere and doesn’t seem capable of taking a bad shot. But everything tends to look too pretty here — the scenery, sets and costumes included, especially for the rougher byways and more perilous interludes, like the Benzedrine nights that feel more opiated than hopped up.
Viggo Mortensen makes things jump with his sepulchral growl as Old Bull Lee (William S. Burroughs), and Elisabeth Moss and Amy Adams pump juice into sidelined wives. But Mr. Salles, an intelligent director whose films include “The Motorcycle Diaries,” doesn’t invest “On the Road” with the wildness it needs for its visual style, narrative approach and leads. This lack of wildness – the absence of danger, uncertainty or a deep feeling for the mad ones – especially hurts Dean, who despite the appealing Mr. Hedlund, never jumps off the screen to show you how Cassady fired up Kerouac and the rest. Dean hauls around a tattered copy of “Swann’s Way,” but, unlike Sal, he can’t turn the reading, driving and fornicating – his life on the road – into transcendence and neither can this film.
IFC Films and Sundance Selects will release the movie in the United States later this year.
Correction: May 23, 2012
Because of an editor’s error, an earlier version of this post misstated the timing of Kerouac’s first published novel, “The Town and the City,” and the period covered by the film. The film begins in 1947, not 1946, and ends in 1951, the year after the book came out, not the year before its publication.