On the Road

Just seen this film, it's ten to two in the morning, late night showing. Want to review it, can't keep eyes open. Blogging this as reminder!

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Against my better judgement I'll try and write something coherent now.  My honest opinion is the whole thing was a bit muddled, or maybe that was me. I haven't read the book, another one I intend to put on my list, my reading is being massively disrupted shamefully by pokemon and knitting, earning a wage and volunteering, getting lost... And watching films. If I had read the book perhaps I'd have been irked by the changes made, of which I've been told there are a few, but there were those standard Hollywood flairs that irked me anyway. The book itself is supposed to embody the beatnik movement of it's time, the late 40s, early 50s, I know of it, I read Howl. Still doesn't mean I liked the film.

The film was produced by Francis Ford Coppolla, had a modest budget, a fancy foreign director (he did the film adaptation of The Motorcycle Diaries - watched it for Gael Garcia Bernal - it was good) a flurry of famous names and two relatively unknown leads taking us through the core of the story, it was a Sundance selected film and it had the art house film of something that should have touched me deeply. I'm willing to admit that this is my ongoing problem, I tend not to feel what films are trying to convey nowadays, comedies rarely make me laugh and films about people trying desperately to find themselves and battle through life rarely touch me as much as they should. Perhaps I'm jaded but I was confused about the message the film and probably the original text was trying to convey. I won't go into a big diatribe about how I disagree with any of it. I can't say I disagree with it because it's not a clear cut message. The film itself is about as aimless as it's lead characters and that's not really a good thing.

Sal, the main character, is an aspiring writer. It's the age-old adage that in order to write something, honestly, with any authority or emotion, you have to have felt it or lived it yourself. Andy McNab writing about soldiers, Candace Bushnell writing about being a columnist in New York... I'm tired but I could further this list given time... There is also the blunt fact that in fairness authors can pretty much make up whatever the hell they want, they need no authority, no experience, they can just take us on a flight of fantasy. But for it to be coherent, for it to be any good, there always has to be a human element, an anchor of reality, real emotions. That's what author's strive for, being able to transport people to their world, in order to do that it has to be convincing. Don't get me wrong, there are terrible authors who are barely capable of transporting anyone anywhere but their ideas are good and people enjoy that. Getting to my point! Sal is, from my basic understanding and weariness, trying to live, meet people, immerse himself in life, in order to find inspiration to write. The more you see, the more people you meet, the more you know, learn, feel, the more you can write about. He sits for ages with his little notepads when he is about doing something, when he is with others, that's where he learns, thus he scribbles it down.

So Sal meets Dean, he meets a lot of other people but the core of the film is his relationship with Dean. To be honest, it's not even so much about Sal himself, the character isn't really all that fleshed out (aside from his beatnik sensibilities and love for the cotton-pickers of the world), this film is about Dean, Dean's relationships, Dean's philosophy, Dean's life, we start the film hearing about him, end the film thinking about him. As we are putting so much focus on this guy let's hope he's something to get damn excited about. Well Garrett Hedlund is a delight to observe, he has the James Bond style flair at getting with the ladies, and when that's not an option, hey the boy isn't picky. He's a charismatic, beautiful creature with the soul of a poet and the ability to drag everyone and everything crashing down to his destructive level. He's a firecracker, he lives in the moment, he's a thrillseeker, he's bright and he's exciting, but with the light comes dark, good comes the bad, as good as he can be he's also massively disappointing in his actions and what he does, he also has a knack for leaving. So he's a brilliant arsehole.

I don't care about the fact that the film dots about in an unstructured fashion, not so bothered that there is very little in terms of plot, it's just a bunch of stuff that happens after given intervals as the main character essentially lives his life and Dean hurtles in and out of it with his road trips and adventures. Not so bothered by the standard travelling music that plays, I even quite liked the jazz. Didn't care that all the characters, as in all films trying to depict the frailties of humanity, has the characters excessively drinking, smoking and taking recreational drugs, mostly for fun and because, well smoking was as common as anything at the time. It's a Hollywood trope that usually irritates me, that for the characters to be so intense, so interesting, they all have to drink hard liquor and engage in drug use, just because they are so deep, it's the only way they handle it, in this film I'm not bothered. I would say I was a bit bothered by seeing Steve Buscemi in a compromising position... I'll get over it. The overbearing sex in the film was slightly unecessary at points... But hey, perhaps that's just me, it's not often there are multiple threesomes in your popcorn films - well one was a non starter but almost two times!

Here I am trying to puzzle out the message of film. I'll admit, it's life, it's a messy, uncontrollable mass of decisions, mistakes, people and adventures... But was Sal trying to find himself? Was he trying to find inspiration to write? If so did all he find was Dean? A twisted person, someone who had hurt just about everyone around him, he was a whole lot of fun, but wasn't what Sal wanted to find something within himself to write? Did he? Because all the film conveyed was him somewhat using Dean as his inspiration. I've always deeply believed that to write something it has to come from within ourselves, somewhere deep down, we have to understand ourselves as a person, knowing someone else is... I don't want to say easy, because you can fill in the gaps if there are any, to know yourself completely is a tougher challenge. That's not what this film is about, the writing part, but as someone who is trying to write, or least believes one day she'll send something to a publisher that she thinks is good enough... Ah crap. My train of thought has evaporated. I'll cave. Sal didn't need to know himself, he knew Dean, he wrote what he knew, that was Dean, Dean was a pretty damn interesting subject. Way more interesting than him it would seem, or the road, why am I moaning about all this?

Ok so through all this I have failed to address the actual components of the film, the actors, I always give a bit of my opinion on them. Hey go figure, Kristen Stewart can smile, she can sing, she can do sex scenes somewhat convincingly, good for her, I didn't hate or love her performance, she did what she could with what she was given, I'm not going to complain about it, plus even with her downward curve of a mouth, she is quite pretty, the camera at least loves her. Then there is the revelation which is Garrett Hedlund, playing the lead Dean, I could list some superlatives to describe how impressed I was by the guy, he was a sight to behold in every scene, he managed to convey the enigmatic, incandescence of whatever Dean was supposed to be, best part of the film apart from probably the cinematography. The other lead, Sal, was played by Sam Riley, now this guy has already played Ian Curtis, something he did very well, I expected great things from him, he didn't disappoint, even though the character was quite a thinly drawn mask of an author, he was still very good. Kirsten Dunst also made an appearance but for the life of me I can't say anything was remotely memorable about her aggregate ten minutes of screen time, shame too because she is usually quite a reliable source of entertainment; she just had so little to work with, again. Amy Adams popped up, as she did in every film that was advertised at the cinema, she was a bit ker-azy, Viggo Mortensen made an appearance, took his trousers off and took some drugs while he was at it. Elisabeth Moss was about too, along with the aforementioned Steve Buscemi, some seriously fun casting, but it didn't detract from the overall aimlessness of the film.

It's fair to say I'm probably just nitpicking, it's creeping towards dawn and I'm not in the most forgiving of minds. For a film to mean something, anything, it has to transcend the doldrums of life, it has to give us something to think about, a message, a reason, why does it exist? What is it trying to say? That the more exciting, bright and creative a person is the more destructive, dark and suicidal they are? That the road is the place to find yourself? That life is mess and you live and you learn? Being a beatnik author is hard graft! Perhaps someone should just smugly smile at me and say 'It's just too deep for you.' Then I'll put a bag over my head and walk off. I dunno... It wasn't a bad film. It wasn't the best either. It'll fall into the category between mediocrity and memorable, I'll get round to reading the book before I judge it much more. It was long and I'm tired, it's past 3am and I'm all out of words that might come together in sentences of any coherence. I think I've rambled enough. I bid you adieu.