Film Carew

For a work so often cited as inspiration for the road-movie genre, Jack Kerouac's hard-typing beat-poetic mangled-memoir On The Road rarely resembles the stories it has supposedly spawned; all those claiming to be sired by the landmark of American fiction more likely inspired by the idea of the book (or, y'know, the Cliff's Notes thereof). Though it is about cross-country voyages symbolising both internal emotional journeys and broader cultural ones —the yearning of youth as the very spirit of counter-cultural insurgence— it isn't some single road-trip, a neat narrative from Kansas to the Emerald City and back, tied up, at the end, in a ribbon bow. Instead, it's a saga that stops and starts amidst all that blunt prose and hard words and punched full-stops; not one journey but many of them, over time; a tale as much about the seductive lure of the road as an idea as it is about actually being on it; a bildungsroman in which the author both comes of age and then grows up; and, eventually, grows old.

There's a thorough narrative in the book, but it's not the kind of neat one that begets easy adaptations; and, so, Hollywood's spent four or so decades trying to wrangle this bitch of an adapation —this itchy beast of a bitchin' time— into a coherent, filmable form; with the need to shoot it as a sprawling '40s/'50s period-piece, set against a landscape that no longer exists, making it extra onerous. If you get caught up in the logistics of it, Walter Salles' to-screen translation of Kerouac is a marvel: managing to not only summon a theatricalised realm that captures a long-ago time receding ever further, ever more rapidly, into the distant past, but to inhabit that theatricalised realm with a sense of in-the-present realism; giving us not just the old-fashioned cars, but the dirt on the windshield and the sweat on its passengers. Its passengers are, of course, famous figures in beat lore, told under their old pseudonyms but all too obviously being Jack and Neal, Ginsbourg and Burroughs.

The Kerouacian narrator is played, here, by Sam Riley, a semi-inspired piece of casting that, at least, gives us a committed thesp with little thought of his own vanity; and Riley creates a gravely-voiced, balled-up physicality that is, I guess we can be glad, two parts evocative characterisation, only one part Kerouac cartoon. Dean Headlund —who is, to me, like some slightly-edgier sequel to Chad Michael Murray— plays the Neal Cassady-inspired bromantic foil, and his natural bro-ish-ness serves the bro'd role well; gives rise to both the abundant charisma and the needy selfishness; the endless lust for new horizons and new flesh seen as being both liberation and prison; his ability to escape from any hint of regular-life drudgery both a blessed skill and a callow ducking of adult responsibilities.

Beyond the two dudes as leads, there's a merry cast of famous folk dirtied up and gleefully throwing themselves into this Important Movie; Viggo Mortensen probably actually on the nod, as Ol' Bill, he's so method; Amy Adams hoping to get like three separate Oscar nominations; Steve Buscemi managing to give his characterised, manifested queer-predator-punchline a hint of quiet dignity; Elisabeth Moss doing a fine line in pissed-off that isn't a million miles away from her work in the greatest television drama ever. Yet, the world will be most interested in the fact that Kristen Stewart is in this, and that she is quite good in it; escaping the embalmed stiffness of Twilight's utterly inert artistic mausoleum with an obvious sense of life; a veritable joie de vivre that perfectly bleeds into her role as excited, emancipated, desirous teenager tearing down all and sundry social inhibitions with every giddy sexual transgression. Also: you see her cans. But, you see them casually; with a carnality that feels natural and beastly and just kinda there, unleered at; caught through a lens that forever sees the big picture and tiny details, but rarely stares at the obvious; instead more interested in the way natural light swims through smeared glass or the way smoke curls in seductive filigrees and eddying mists around Riley's fingers as he drags, smirking, on endless cigarettes.

It's not nearly as good —nor as profound— as Salles' heartfelt portrait of Ernesto Guevera on his way to becoming Ché, 2004's The Motorcycle Diaries; lacking the same instances of inspired, unexpected vérité and the same cultural, sociological heft. But it's of the same spirit, and made with the same sense of good grace; his reading of On The Road an adaptation far better than what you'd fear Hollywood would do to the text.

For those who love a good 'stranger than fiction' documentary, Searching For Sugar Man (and, P.S., not Bart Layton's The Imposter) is the cinematic this-true-story-will-blow-yr-balls-back event o' th' year. If you've never heard of lost-then-rediscovered early-'70s folkie singer-songwriter Rodriguez, then all the better: if so, go on spoiler-avoiding lockdown, and let the insane swings of this real-life narrative take you for a wild (oh, rollercoaster, I suppose) ride. Malik Bendjelloul had a whole history of turning crazy real-life tales into six-minute segments on Swedish television, which means he knows how to tell a story inside and out; and those yarn-spinning skills pay some serious bills here. In short: Rodriguez, a Nick Drake-ish chronicler of lost souls, depression, and counter-cultural rebellion over forlorn fingerpickin', put out two pristinely-produced and deftly-played LPs in 1970 and '71; they tanked, and he vanished into the ether, a ghost lost in his hometown ghost-town, Detroitt. Yet, in apartheid-era South Africa, somehow the albums became landmarks, and the mythical man who made them —whose name nor identity no one in Capetown knew— became the stuff of urban legend. There's vast cultural and pop-cultural themes Bendjelloul touches on —black (or, at least, brown) music inspiring those white folk uneasy with their racial hegemony; the pre-mass-communication era's sense of utter isolation and dislocation; the reissue-era desire to uncover (and fetishise) the most dramatically 'lost' of all golden age artists and have them reconsumable in the digital now— but, really, just skims over. He's, instead, all about the story; taking the South African perspective —of blissful ignorance and urban legend— and letting it dictate the narrative. This means, when twists come (and come and come), they don't feel perfunctory, but revelatory.

Hirokazu Kore-eda's first four narrative features —Maborosi, After Life, Distance, Nobody Knows— are a perfectly-sustained suite of quiet, philosophical contemplation, meticulous cinematic formalism, endless empathy, and aching humanity; a quartet whose explorations of loss, death, memory, and childhood chart the very experience of existence with elegance, grace, and impeccable auteurist credentials. It's hard not to think of those early days —of the senses-tingling tenor of his career's entire first arc— when watching I Wish, which very much classifies as minor Kore-eda; being, in some ways, the least-essential film in his 20-year, 8-narrative-feature canon. And if it's hard not to think of those early days —oh, those Tadanobu days— then it's pretty much impossible not to think of Nobody Knows, which still stands as Kore-eda's best-known and most widely-released picture. That film found four children living alone, in hiding in a Tokyo apartment, abandoned by their mother; Kore-eda staging a dual study of the child's perception of the world around them and the erosion of social responsibility and community amongst adults. I Wish shares a preponderance of pre-adolescent protagonists with that picture, and, too, fashions a warm portrait of how children survive and persist in the fact of parental failure; this, here, about the children of divorce, and how they navigate their newly-divided lives —and their destroyed nuclear-family model— with peppy spirits and mischievous monkeyshines. But there's precious little of the same profundity; as things get determinedly feelgood with a spate of jaunty musical cues, bawdy comic set-pieces, and iridescent optimism. Where Nobody Knows saw a harrowing real-life tale of grim survival through the wide eyes and wild imaginations of children —thereby making it melancholy social commentary schooled in cinematic socio-realism— I Wish may actually just be a film for ten-year-old boys; with all the busy pace, sunny sentiments, and narrative reductionism that suggests. In the face of such crowd-pleasery, it makes you feel like a bit of a prick to feel so 'meh' about it, but, hey, I've been called way worse.