LUST HIGHWAY – On The Road
On the Road (alias The Hangover III, MLitt ) Thursday afternoon at the Dendy.
REVIEWED BY CRITIC, FILM BUFF & BEER CONNOISSEUR F.P. BLUCK
The previews: Mental (seems loud and vulgar), Argo (fake making a movie to cover getting hostages out of Iran) and a thing called The Sessions, where a gracefully-ageing Helen Hunt plays sex therapist to a quadriplegic.
The movie has a plot, sort of, and is based on Kerouac’s book, sort of. It could be summarised thus: Insensitive loser (named Dean Moriarty) and narcissistic would-be author (named Sal Paradise but who is really Kerouac) have a bromance from the late 1940s to the early 1950s.
The loser is also the love interest of Kirsten Dunst (doing well as a sensible woman whom the loser marries), various floozies including the retinue at a Mexican whorehouse, a teenager whom he also marries and the narcissist’s pretentious mate. Oh, and a frankly depicted commercial arrangement with Steve Buscemi, playing a weird guy*. Minor but solid role for Viggo Mortensen and appearances by, I am informed, some people who were in the Twilight movies. Everyone smokes and drinks their heads off, the loser leads a variety of drug-taking exercises and lots of people have joyless but noisy sex. Corey Bernardi would not be pleased.
The youth – people who would have missed the worst of the Depression and who missed WWII because they would have been too young – are generally useless and self-indulgent.
The narcissist does a sort of interrupted monologue that shows how he is full of the thoughts he tries to crush as he walks and hitches everywhere. He bonks the teenager, a cottonpicker with whom he shares a tent, while her child watches and a Mexican whore, just before collapsing in a haze of pot, peyote, booze and dysentery. Breakfast of champions.
The film features some genuinely brilliant outdoor shots. It’s a really good travelogue over the American backblocks (plus New York and San Francisco), mostly to show how the loser drives like a loon and irritates the police. There are a few noirish moments that could be longer, along with lovely driving jazz and bebop music to which the loser and the various femmes de l’heure dance in a way that my mother might consider suggestive.
Overall it was OK – but would have been far better if someone had let off the brake and allowed the whole damn thing hurtle down its true path.
* – as if Buscemi could play anything else, except possibly the result of a human/meerkat mating.
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