Walter Salles (2012)

Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries is a good movie and, on the face of it, a good qualification for directing On the Road.  (Francis Ford Coppola bought the screen rights to the Jack Kerouac novel in 1979.  After several false starts, Coppola hired Salles after seeing The Motorcycle Diaries.)  But the film sits on the screen – emotionally remote and less visually kinetic than you’d expect.  I think there are two main reasons for this – the original’s extraordinary status and the actor playing Kerouac’s alter ego Sal Paradise.  On the Road is regarded as a definitive expression of a particular cultural time and place.  What’s more, it’s taken an improbably long time to make it to the screen – the film arrives in cinemas fifty-five years after the book’s publication.  The approach taken by Salles (and Jose Rivera, who wrote the screenplay) seems not only to assume a familiarity with the original but to reflect a reverent, tentative approach to it – as if the filmmakers feared being accused of hijacking a classic, as if it were a piece of priceless china they might drop and break in the act of transporting it to the screen.  I haven’t read On the Road.  I’m assuming its immediate success depended in no small part on the book’s description of a very new kind of lifestyle – fascinating pr enraging those who didn’t know it, delighting those who did that someone had encapsulated their habits and values.  But what Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty (based on Neal Cassady) get up to no longer seems outré.  Walter Salles’ caution reinforces one’s awareness that the passage of time has robbed On the Road of its rebellious flavour and novelty value.

The casting of Sam Riley as Sal is baffling.  Riley’s face is more expressive and he has more vocal substance than I’d expected from his work in Control and Brighton Rock but this is damning with faint praise.  You don’t connect to Sal at all or find yourself wanting to know what’s going to happen to him.  And not much does happen – one of the strengths of The Motorcycle Diaries was how it showed a middle-class young man called Ernesto Guevara emerging from his travels as the potential Che.  Walter Salles highlighted certain events that explained the birth of Guevara’s political thinking but without over-stressing them.  What Salles achieved working with Gael García Bernal in the earlier film doesn’t happen at all with Sam Riley – and, to be fair to Riley, it’s not really his fault.  Sal is often more an observer of the events in On the Road than a participant in them.  The rationed use of voiceover, although commendable in principle, further reduces Riley’s opportunities to convey a sense of excitement at being on the move (in more ways than one).  As Dean Moriarty, Garrett Hedlund has more vitality and is vocally strong but most of Dean’s behaviour makes him seem a prat rather than charismatic.  Salles has been quoted as saying he wanted ‘unknowns’ for the main roles in On the Road and it  seems he cast Riley, Hedlund and Kristen Stewart as Marylou (the teenage wife of Dean at the start of the film, Sal’s sexual partner later in the story) in 2007.  Stewart’s presence in the film seems doubly pointless:  she’s anything but unknown to large audiences after the Twilight series – the fact that she doesn’t register strongly here appears to be due merely to her limitations as an actress.

Tom Sturridge does well as Carlo Marx (aka Allen Ginsberg) but Salles’ being in thrall to the book appears to have infected some of the well-known names in supporting roles.  There’s no real life to Viggo Mortensen’s cameo as Old Bull Lee (supposedly based on William Burroughs) and Steve Buscemi is surprisingly obvious as a pederastic salesman.  Amy Adams and Kirsten Dunst, however, shine.  Adams makes a remarkably strong impression in the small part of Old Bull Lee’s wife and Dunst, as Dean’s girlfriend Camille, is marvellous in the scene where the couple break up.  Camille tells Dean to get lost.  It hurts her to say it; the hurt makes her even angrier with him and what she’s said all the more irrevocable.

23 October 2012