MovieChat Forums > On the Road (2012) Discussion > Wrong actors

Wrong actors

posted 12 years ago by momohund
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Wrong actors for this film. The guy who played Neil Cassady couldn't have been further off in character. Cassady had a mid-West twang, the actor didn't look anything like him, didn't capture Cassady's charm and charisma at all. Viggo Mortensen played a good Bill Burroughs. The guy who played Kerouac was okay, but not great. The Ginsburg character was good in physical likeness but didn't get Ginsburg's accent either or charisma.

The script was pretty good. But On the Road is a romantic novel about rediscovering America as a young man and breaking out of conformity after a long period of calamities (WWII and the Great Depression). The film would have done better of it caught more romantic images of the American landscape in the style of The Straight Story by David Lynch. The drug scenes would have been better if we could experience the drug experiences first person instead of second person. In other words, the drug experiences should have been filmed more like Fear and Loathing. The way On the Road did it made us observers which didn't capture the romance and excitement of the drug experiences. We just sat back and watched the effects on Kerouac and Cassady, which didn't really deliver effectively.

The sex/romantic scenes were done well, particularly when Kerouac was picking cotton. That was right from the book and cast well.

All-in-all slightly disappointing.

[–] ellandroad_allstars 12 years ago

The thing is the book is written like a letter to a friend by Kerouac and he doesn't stop too often to explain things in any great detail; it's all fast and exuberant and almost second hand, so I'm not sure seeing drug taking from the POV of any of the characters would have worked.

I liked Hedlund's performance as Dean. Everything about the film is just much more low key than the book and more downbeat and real to the point where I see it as a counter part to the book. The book was Kerouac's perspective while the film is from the point of view of an older person or just someone looking at all the beats the book neglects to focus on.