Jack Kerouac's On The Road, published a half-century ago this fall, has been considered virtually unfilmable — until now. Brazilian director Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) has been tagged to deliver the long-awaited film adaptation in 2009 for Francis Coppolla's American Zoetrope, according to IMDB. Even Coppolla, who's held the novel's film rights since 1968, claims that On the Road "... is inherently difficult to adapt to the screen, and we've never quite found the right combination of director and writer to do it justice until now." This is interesting — a road story unfilmable? Think of the length and breadth of a film genre that Kerouac's book helped redefine for the jet age: from Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde to Thelma & Louise and Little Miss Sunshine; and of course there are Salles' own Motorcycle Diaries and the Cuaróns' Y Tu Mamá Tambien, two imports which resonate with American viewers for their themes of socio/political and sexual discovery along the crooked-line narrative device of the road. And therein lies the problem: most road movies use the road to thread together a story with an overt theme (the Depression, feminism, political revolution, coming-of-age). Keroauc's story is more document than tale; its themes and lessons are one with the action, and the typical Hollywood treatment would make a hash out of teasing them into plain view.
But with the emergence of a new sensibility weaned on years of reality TV and camcorders comes fertile ground for an On the Road movie. Salles will supposedly be taking a low-fi approach, using hand-held video cameras and unknown actors, two much-touted hallmarks of “mumblecore,” which has come into prominence this past year as the film school rejoinder to YouTube video verité. Like these new lo-fi auteurs, Kerouac was accused of indulging his generation's angst-driven minutiae — recording every goofball scenario and all words mumbled, yelled, slurred, or fervently proclaimed in his account of postwar twenty-somethings living in the moment and in pursuit of an unarticulated something.
The literary merits of his compressed lyrical shorthand were hotly contested at the time of On the Road's publication: Truman Capote famously derided it as mere “typing.” Today, some accuse the directors of “mumblecore” of simply leaving their camcorders running. I personally think of Hannah Takes the Stairs as the first "smaller-than-life" movie; I was underwhelmed by its microscopic angst and mostly untouched by its inarticulate characters. Kerouac's Beat protagonists were, in spite of all the benzedrine popping, infinitely more expressive, and almost fatally hyper-engaged with the world at large. But that's just me, or at least that's just Hannah. It's only a matter of time before mumblecore's hyper-self-consciousness meets bigger-world-consciousness. It may already have already happened (I haven't seen Quiet City yet — from the trailer it does indeed seem a lyrical and world-conscious work). And as for our sad but gloriously kinetic Road heroes Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty — I'm anxious to see how they come off on the big screen. Will they connect with the Internet generation? Will they blaze longer and brighter than Into the Wild's Christopher McCandless or will they end up as irrelevant and ghostly as poor old Sky Captain? Perhaps the Beat and Mumble Generations will, in the end, save each other.
Above: Hanna Takes the Stairs' Greta Gerwig shares a quiet moment with Jack Kerouac
