On the Road (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

*½/****
Image C+ Sound A- Extras D+

starring
Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortensen

screenplay
by Jose Rivera, based on the novel by Jack Kerouac

directed
by Walter Salles 


Ontheroad1click
any image to enlarge

by
Angelo Muredda
 "You goin'
some place, or just goin'?" a fellow traveller asks Sam Riley's Sal
Paradise in the long-gestating, still-undigested On
the Road
, Walter Salles's
handsomely-mounted but stiff adaptation of Jack Kerouac's hipster
Bible. While that's
a dangerous line to adapt in such an aimless movie, it isn't even the
most
unfortunate moment of meta-commentary within the first ten minutes.
Consider
Sal's panicked voiceover about the text he's spinning out, ostensibly
the same
one we're trudging through: "And what is there to talk about exactly?
The
book I'm not writing? The inspiration I don't feel? Even the beer's
flat."
What, indeed? What's left to say about a project that insists
on reviewing
itself at regular checkpoints and keeps finding its inspiration
wanting?

RUNNING TIME
124 minutes
MPAA
R
ASPECT
RATIO(S)

2.40:1 (1080p/MPEG-4)
LANGUAGES
English 5.1 DTS-HD MA
English 2.0 LPCM (Stereo)

SUBTITLES
English SDH
Spanish

REGION
A
DISC
TYPE

BD-25
STUDIO
Sundance

The beer certainly is flat,
but credit Salles and production designer Carlos Conti for otherwise
stocking
the film with just the right amount of postwar American tchotchkes to
make us
feel at home. Road movies typically live or die on the strength of the
travellers and their changing environments, and On
the Road
is an absolute wash on the
first front. Riley, so good as Ian Curtis in Control,
is too taxed by his problems with nailing an
American accent to bother giving much of a performance here; at best,
this is a
passable table read. Garrett Hedlund doesn't fare much better
as the Neal
Cassady stand-in Dean Moriarty, which is deadly for an adaptation of a
book
that hinges on Dean's manic charisma to get from moment to moment, from
state to
state. Sal keeps telling us that Dean is a freewheeling genius, but we
don't
see it: Hedlund is charming enough yet too buttoned-up to be anyone's
messiah, making his diminished final state as Sal's fortunes rise
indistinguishable
from his salad days.

That the all-American
locales Sal and Dean careen through are so fleshed-out by comparison is
both a
boon and a serious problem. This is an impossibly pretty film,
gorgeously
lensed by Olivier Assayas's DP Eric Gautier, who caught the same
off-postcard
beauty for Che Guevara's road trip in Salles's The
Motorcycle Diaries
.
But this lyrical photography, though consistent with the delectable
contemporary
editions of Kerouac's book covers, is out of step
with the text, not least Sal's pronouncement that he cares only for
"the
mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved,
desirous
of everything at the same time." Riley's sleepy delivery aside, there's
no
madness in Salles's fastidious design, and, save for Kristen Stewart's
gamely
rumpled performance as both men's underage lover Marylou, no desire,
either.
When Dean bellows that he can "smell the marijuana" in their late
jaunt through Mexico (actually Arizona), you wonder what he's smoking.

Stewart's surprisingly
vigorous sex scenes with both men–still no match for Robert
Pattinson's
extended prostate exam opposite Emily Hampshire in Cosmopolis–feel
more like remnants from the movie Salles
wished he was making than anything integral to the one before him. To
be fair, the overall prudishness isn't all on him. Kerouac's novel is
arguably more genteel than it lets on–a tale of drifters who have to
go
home again sometime, at least to collect the advance and write the book
about
the whole ordeal. This is the sort of movie that cues up a jazz number
when it
wants to be loose, throws to feverish black faces when it wants to be
authentic, and defaults on Stewart's stringy hair and sweaty mug when
it wants
to signify weary youth ambling through life. Slumming is its method as
much as
its content, but you could say the same about Kerouac's novel. Still,
pity
about the flat beer.

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THE
BLU-RAY DISC

On the Road
is one of those movies that looks better on disc in trailer form than
in its
feature-length incarnation. The 2.35:1, 1080p transfer doesn't pop, dig?
The
picture was shot in 35mm but subsequently sapped of grain and fine
detail,
drained of colour and deep black, and alternately stained cyan and tobacco depending on the season being represented. My hunch is that these
issues rest
with the DI–especially the dearth of grain, because the presentation
doesn't
have that waxiness I associate with post facto
DVNR; when grain does
poke through, in dimly-lit scenes, it has a peculiar texture, vaguely
reminiscent of mosquito noise. While the diffuse, almost milky image
occasionally complements the smoke-filled haze in which these
characters exist,
it's difficult for me to believe it's everything the filmmakers
intended; at
the very least, the allotted disc space could be more generous–packing
124
minutes onto a single layer just doesn't cut it these days. Still, it's
better
than the Canadian alternative: no Blu-ray. Comparatively lucid, the attendant 5.1 DTS-HD MA track delivers a modest though by no means ineffectual
mix
with surprising might. The walls of jazz that spring up are technically
dazzling.

Extras are limited to On the Road's theatrical trailer plus an
8-minute
portion of deleted scenes (both HD and DD 5.1), none of them
containing the
Bella Swan nudity that was cut from the film yet lives on in
Google-cache
memory. Instead, find more of Dean the human oil spill doing Dean-like
things,
such as terrifying two seminarian passengers with his speeding. He also
reads Swann's
Way
some more. HiDef trailers for Love and Honor,
The Loneliest
Planet
(which didn't even get a Blu-ray release, making this a
tease), How to Survive a Plague, The
Reluctant Fundamentalist
,
and Something in the Air cue up on startup of the Sundance Selects platter.

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3 Comments

  1. Plebontheweb

    That shot, though, is the nicest Kirsten Stewart will EVER look.

  2. Plebontheweb

    That shot, though, is the nicest Kirsten Stewart will EVER look.

  3. Plebontheweb

    That shot, though, is the nicest Kirsten Stewart will EVER look.

Comments are closed