On the Road (Walter Salles, 2012)

Kerouac's cult novel finally made it to the big screen, over sixty years after it was written, and it took a French-Brazilian collaboration to do it, casting an English actor as the narrator and focal character to boot. You wonder why the Americans would be so uninterested in their own national mythology when it comes to the beat generation. Perhaps there is too great a degree of dissociation between the mix of pretentious naivety of the self-styled poets drifting in the vacuum immediately after the war and the post-Vietnam and post-hippy world: the beats have nothing relevant to offer any more.
The film did not receive a favourable reaction, in any case. For me, the fault does lie with the source, as the adaptation is quite faithful and actually reduces the cringeworthiness of the worst excesses and self-indulgences in the novel, bringing out some of the poetry of the characters that originally attracted readers and contextualising their actions more successfully than the novel, as the lens gives us a third-party perspective outside the narrator's prejudiced eye. It is quite clear we are dealing with hopelessly immature pricks. It is also handsomely shot and Garrett Hedlund is a revelation as the mercurial drifter, Dean Moriarty. But you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear and Salles's attempt, while brave, is always fighting an uphill battle, frequently too enamoured of its stars and the novel's status to retain a healthy distance.

5/10