Big Change at Big Sur: Is Jack Kerouac Actually Filmable?

Within twelve months, cinema has attempted the two poles of Jack Kerouac: Walter Salles' starry On the Road and now Michael Polish's Big Sur, a small, serious film of the 1962 novel in which the author — as alter ego Jack Duluoz — retreats to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin to dry out and instead watches his mind come apart. The double experiment invites the old question: can you film a voice?

Big Sur is the harder, better test case. The novel has almost no plot — arrivals, departures, a breakdown — but it has Kerouac's late style at maximum pressure, prose sprinting ahead of its own punctuation. Polish's solution is surrender: Jean-Marc Barr's Duluoz barely acts while the narration, lifted nearly verbatim, does the heavy lifting over Big Sur's fog and surf. It's closer to a guided reading than a drama, which is both its limit and its integrity.

On the Road tried the opposite — dramatize the episodes, trim the voice — and demonstrated the paradox: fidelity to Kerouac's events without his sentences yields a road trip with strangers.

Verdict: Kerouac is filmable the way music is photographable. The novel remains the event; the films are documentation — and Polish's, at least, knows it.