I start my London Film Festival film 10K today (I'm only seeing 8 films over a week which I don't think quite qualifies as a marathon) but yesterday had to squeeze in a quick general release: On The Road and it wasn't a great start.
I can't fault the performances and the visual presentation it's more the story. I haven't read Jack Kerouac's book on which the film is based but know some of the famous quotes and you can't deny he had an outstanding talent for words and observation.
My problem is that I couldn't marry the hedonistic, selfish and often misogynistic behaviour on the road trip with that language. His skill I suppose it to have turned what I view as ugly behaviour into something beautiful but I have problems with that too.
Writer Sal Paradise's (Sam Riley's) fascination and obsession with the drug-taking, drinking, womanising philanderer Dean Moriaty (Garrett Hedlund) I just didn't get.
Sal, while engaging in much of the partying is also a passive observer. He rejects very little of Dean's behaviour - choosing not to participate in a threesome for example although he has spells where he works to pay for his travelling and forms a sort of meaningful relationship with a co-worker.
But the final pay-off when Sal turns his back on Dean doesn't quite feel like enough. His travelling life in between the partying felt much more enriching I couldn't see what he was getting artistically out of the hedonism. Maybe its me but Dean and his friends just feel like wasters not people who are genuinely enjoying life, living it to the full, doing interesting things and having interesting converstions. Is there supposed to be an irony? And isn't this just men behaving badly wrapped as something arty and meaningful?
As they drove from one place to the next stealing food, partying and breaking hearts I starting wishing they just crash off the road and it would end.
There were three, mid-teenage boys in the screening who chomped noisily through buckets of pop-corn and chatted to each other throughout and I wonder what they took away from it.
Perhaps the book is more illuminating but essentially I thought On The Road was plodding and monotonous and was glad to ditch the lot of them. I'm going to give it 50%. On IMDb it has 66% but no Metacritic score yet while on Rotten Tomatoes it has 53% and 49% of site visitors give it three and a half stars or more.
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