dvd of the week
After nearly twenty years of big name American directors circling an adaptation of the classic beat novel On the Road, it was the Brazilian Walter Salles, who directed Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries, who managed to get it made; his first English-language film. Nowhere near as acclaimed as those two movies, On the Road is still a gorgeous and affecting movie, if unformed and unsure. Jack Kerouac’s novel, focusing on the search for meaning and experience and sex among late 1940s beatniks, is mostly about the language and emotions and the relationships; and plot-light stories don’t always translate to film well. The enjoyment of Salles’ film is in the enormously charismatic performance of Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty, who plays the salt-of-the-earth juvenile criminal both Sal Paradise (Sam Riley, as Kerouac’s alter ego) and Carlo Marx (Tom Sturridge, as Allen Ginsburg’s alter ego) are obsessed with. The sexual tension among and between all of them – with or without their women played by Kristen Stewart, Kirsten Dunst, and Alice Braga – is wonderfully handled. You can’t tear your eyes away.
