If You See Salles' Film: It's NOT The Book, Fine. Not Beat, Not So Fine.

We should have expected it, really. When Walter Salles, director of the outstanding road-trip film The Motorcycle Diaries, set out of adapt Kerouac's novel, I had high hopes. I felt that if a director could get under the skin of pre-revolutionary Che Guevara and make that stick for an audience that included many who hate Guevara and what he became, he'd handle Dean Moriarty well.

Then I saw the film, and I left this review at the New York Times page that reviewed the film.  Students, here it is. The film get 3 of 5 stars from me.

"Missing One Big Element--Being Beat"

I have taught the novel to college undergrads four times now, and the book never fails to surprise me. We finished work on Kerouac's novel last week, and I'd passed on the chance to teach the film. When I saw it, I realized I had made the right decision.

The acting and cinematography impress me mightily, as does the film's energy. I don't mind skipping parts of a dense novel brought to the screen, though some included elements, such as Sal's romance with Terry, fall flat. Sal was really influenced by this, and other than one shot late in the film, viewers never get any sense of how Terry changes Sal.

The key failure of Salles' film is not its dutifulness to the source. It is the failure, thematically, to capture two important points.

First, as Mr. Holden correctly notes, "The movie doesn’t bother to evoke the conflict between the lives of these bohemian wild men and the square America of the 1940s and ’50s." I wanted more of that. There's a nice set-piece shot of Sal walking past a billboard for a new subdivision, way out in the desert. We don't get enough of that, let alone Kerouac's characters showing--and telling--us why they are rebelling. At one point in the novel, Sal describes America as a place where "everyone does what they are supposed to do." All that, in the shadow of The Bomb. Salles' film misses the reasons why Sal and Dean and their circle go mad.

The biggest disappointment was how Salles failed to show the gradual estrangement of Sal and Dean. Until very late in the film, Sal follows Dean eagerly. Thus the viewer does not get the foreshadowing that Kerouac provides for the two friends' final parting, or the ways in which Dean proves too wild even for Sal Paradise.

Ultimately, the film is not Beat enough, nor Dean Beat-ific enough to make Sal's parting with him as poignant as Kerouac wants his readers to understand.