FILM REVIEW: ON THE ROAD

Marylou (Kristen Stewart) in On the Road.

The beat goes on

 

By Ed Rampell

 

In Jack Kerouac’s novel and director Walter Salles’ film adaptions thereof, Sal Paradise (Sam Riley), Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund) and male friends with literary aspirations and sexy female companions careen about the continent in a car, driving like whirling dervishes from place to place, stopping long enough to have madcap misadventures from Denver to Louisiana, San Francisco to Manhattan.

 

Of course, this is a gross oversimplification. What makes the novel -- and movie -- riveting is its context and subtext, as a testament of youthful restlessness and rebellion in America’s postwar years. Listen closely, and you’ll hear fascistic Senator Joe McCarthy on the radio; watch intently, and you’ll see Tricky Dick Nixon on the tube. Kerouac rendered in literary form the cadence and tempo of be-bop music. Along with Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, On The Road is the seminal, iconic work of the Beat generation, a countercultural movement against the “American Way” of A-bombs, anti-communism, McCarthyism, materialism, uber-conformity, etc., in favor of a Bohemian quest for the meaning of life.

 

While the film has many attributes, one of the boldest aspects of this movie is its in-your-face homosexuality. It’s been about 20 or so years since I read On the Road, so memory may fail me, but I don’t remember the gay sex openly recounted in the published version of Kerouac’s text, which he self censored prior to Viking Press’ 1957 publication of the novel in those straighter, more straitlaced times. So if the filmmakers decided to inject this by actually making use of our greater freedoms of expression today, bravo.

 

However, I do recall what A. Robert Lee called “interracial love” in “Tongues Untied, Beat Ethnicities, Beat Multiculture” in the aforementioned The Philosophy of the Beats. Lee references “Sal’s campesina lover Terry”; Brazilian actress Alice Braga winsomely plays the character based on Bea Franco; Sal and Dean have an orgy with Mexican women and also befriend the African American jazz musician Walter (Terrence Howard). One can’t stress enough what a taboo it was for Kerouac to daringly depict inter-ethnic sex and friendships in America where apartheid was still widely practiced, as he also courageously did in other works, such as in 1958’s The Subterraneans. Progressives will also be moved by sequences of the migrant farm workers’ plight.