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Road Movies
By Heather Johnson
Perennially fascinated with the feel of the wind in one's hair, a new life in a new locale, and the freedom and mysteries along the unknown terrain, the road movie is a quintessentially American art form. While not a genre of its own per se, the road movie can encompass elements of other genres, including everything from horror, thriller and film noir, to comedy, cult and crime, among others. To further complicate matters, we can trace the road movie concept back to an era dating back long before there were cars.
Consider Homer's epic poem, The Odyssey, which follows Odysseus, king of Ithaca, on his voyage home after the Trojan War. One of the first works centered on the journey, The Odyssey spawned several films through the years. In 1911, director Francesco Bertolini based the silent film Odissea on the classic Greek poem. O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a more recent derivative (even though brothers Joel and Ethan Coen claim to have never read the poem), involves (I'm oversimplifying here) a trio of escaped chain gang prisoners traversing across the southern U.S. so that the lead character, Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) can reunite with his wife.
Another excellent "cons on the run" road movie with a music tinge was Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law, co-starring singers (Lounge Lizard) John Lurie and Tom Waits, along with Roberto Benigni, skulking through the swampy south; Like O Brother, it also has, not surprisingly, a fine
score.
The road movie typically involves one or more people in motion who face one or more challenges, and emerge either with newfound knowledge, a personal awakening, or, in the most tragic cases, death. These films often conclude with the protagonist reaching a destination, whether it's home or away from home, and with either pleasant or unpleasant results. Other times, a road movie depicts nomadic characters on a seemingly endless journey. Either they thrive on this type of adventure or don't see a way out of a vagabond lifestyle. The desire for something better, whether it's going to sunny California or the bustling Big Apple in search of fame and/or fortune, or escaping from a deadbeat husband, a dysfunctional family, or the law, is one defining element of the road movie.
The Grapes of Wrath
Classic roads
In 1940, John Ford directed one of the earliest road movies, The Grapes of Wrath, based on John Steinbeck's classic novel. Set in the early '30s, the Joad family's native Oklahoma had become a giant dust bowl, a result of the clearing of vegetation to create vast farmland. One of those farmers, Tom Joad (Henry Fonda), returned home from jail to find his home in foreclosure, not to mention in the middle of a dust storm. Desperate, Joad, like so many others during the Great Depression, packs up his family and heads west to California, in search of "a better life." Their journey is not a pleasant one, but they endure, their spirit and perseverance helping them overcome the tragedy that meets them along the way.
Even more famously, one could cite director Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz, filmed in 1939, as a road movie. Although the road Dorothy travels down is made of yellow brick, her encounters along the way with fantastical witches, a tin man and talking lions and scarecrows, as well as her quest to reach a final destination, reflect the road movie's spontaneous spirit, albeit with a happy ending that finds Dorothy content at her Kansas home.
It Happened One Night
One of the best road movies of all time is also one of the best romantic movies, and some would argue, one of the better
screwball comedies - It Happened One Night, with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert (and which surely influenced the later film The Sure Thing, with John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga the strange bedfellows stuck together on the road). It doesn't get much better than that. Except, perhaps, with Sullivan's Travels, in which a film director (Joel McCrea) pretends to be poor so he can find out what it's "really like," but ends up "stuck" with Veronica Lake for most of his traveling. Preston Sturges' classic was also referenced in the Coen's O Brother Where Art Thou - which took its title from the film McCrea's character wanted to make.
On the run
Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, a road movie of the gangster variety produced by lead actor Warren Beatty in 1967, follows the notorious bank robbers from Oklahoma to Texas as they rob small banks along the way and escape the Establishment with every sharp turn of the wheel. They're young, rebellious, beautiful drifters who live on the run and out of their car on the open road. Their life is about the journey, and they meet their demise as a result of their violent adventures along the way.
For Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise, life also gets more complicated (and dangerous), as a result of their journey, which, like Bonnie and Clyde, ensues with no real destination, but with more innocent beginnings. Both dissatisfied with their relationships (coincidentally, Louise's boyfriend, Jimmy stays on the road as a musician), the waitress Louise (Susan Sarandon) and housewife Thelma (played by Geena Davis) run away from their unhappy lives and hit the highways of the rural U.S. No longer suffocated by their demeaning existence, they explore their sexual freedom (in the case of Thelma, explored with J.D., memorably played by a young Brad Pitt), and discover strength they never knew they had (as witnessed in their lethal encounter with a smarmy truck driver). Initially intended as a fun getaway, this road trip goes haywire. Similarly themed films that use the road to escape the law include Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, David Lynch's rocked out Wild at Heart, and Natural Born Killers (1994), among others. And then there's the psycho/serial killer road movie, such as Kalifornia, with Juliette Lewis prepping for NBK, The Hitcher, and a playful, if still disturbing, variation, Joy Ride. And let's not forget the cult classic Freeway, a sickly funny take on the Red Riding Hood fable, with Reese Witherspoon in the "Red" role, and Kiefer Sutherland as the wolf in creep's clothing. "Them are some mighty big fuckin' teeth ya got there, Bob."
In pro-female Thelma & Louise, the road movie's main characters deepen their bond with one another, often assuring (as touring musicians can attest) "what happens on the road stays on the road." Miles and Jack
(Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church) abide by this unwritten code in Alexander Payne's Sideways, a cyclical journey though southern California's wine country that, despite the gorgeous scenery, is more about the relationship between the two men, the revealing of their strengths and many shortcomings, and how they cope with life's disappointments. We know their journey - Jack's last vacation as a single man - will end a week later, but we don't know the joyride will lead to such dramatic, life-shaping results. (If anything, Payne's previous film, About Schmidt, also a road movie, was more depressing.)
Joy rides
While Miles and Jack's vineyard tour produced a lot of sour grapes, other road movies give us a couple of hours to just kick back and enjoy the ride. It's a party on two or four wheels. Of the silly variety, we have the family-bonding-by-mishap National Lampoon's Vacation and its offshoots, all the way up to the stoner variations like Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle; of the dancing-atop-van-to-Gloria Gaynor variety as seen in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; and of the altered states variety, we have cinematic interpretations of gems such as Terry Gilliam's whacked out adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which follows the journey of a gonzo journalist (Johnny Depp) and his Samoan lawyer (a large Benicio Del Toro) to the sparkling entertainment Mecca in a convertible called the Red Shark, a trip fueled by copious amounts of LSD and alcohol.
There are other romantic road movies to follow It Happened One Night, with one of the better examples being Stanley Donen's pleasing Two for the Road, with Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney as a married couple. In this film, the road is traveled upon several times over the course of the couple's tumultuous relationship, jumping back and forth in time.
Other types of roads
There are also rock n' roll road movies, like Almost Famous (in which Patrick Fugit plays a version of Cameron Crowe, as a teen hitting the road with a rock band, learning the ropes of rock journalism - and love), and the underrated Canadian rocku/mockumentary Hard Core Logo. Then there are the silly but fun road movie epics with bloated casts, like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Cannonball Run and the satire The Big Bus, which have little artistic merit but loyal audiences nonetheless. And more political road movies, like Spike Lee's Get on the Bus, about African Americans heading to D.C. for the Million Man March, or Michael Winterbottom's In This World, that have artistic merit but never found a big audience. And then there are Wim Wenders road movies, which are a sort of sub-genre by themselves (Paris, Texas being the masterpiece of the group, with Kings of the Road and Alice in the Cities also fine).
If you mix buddy movies with road movies you get buddies on the run movies, which are plentiful, too - with Midnight Run being one of the better examples, and the Oscar-winning brother-bonding movie Rain Man
one of the more famous. There are also road movie thrillers, the cinematic equivalent of white knuckle driving, like Georges Clouzout's masterfully suspenseful, South American-set Wages of Fear [or the restored version] (and its decent American remake, Sorcerer), about desperate truckers carrying nitro glycerin through the dangerously winding roads of the Andes.
Exiting
An introduction to road movies wouldn't be complete without mentioning the epitome of road movies, the 1969 counterculture classic Easy Rider. With motors humming, two long hairs (Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda) travel from L.A. to New Orleans on their motorcycles and encounter characters odder than them: A rancher and his family, a hitchhiker and his hippie commune community, prostitutes, and Jack Nicholson, who gave a standout performance as the drunken lawyer, George Hanson. A tag line sums up the film, and road movies in general, best: "A man went looking for America...and couldn't find it anywhere!" Easy Rider also begat some odd, dark, even bleak cross-country road movies in the early 1970s, like Monte Hellman's minimalist Vanishing Point and the sadly out of print Two Lane Blacktop, or Steven Spielberg's brilliant, nearly dialogue-free (and made for TV) exercise in road terror, Duel (starring the just departed Dennis Weaver).
Heather Johnson is an independent music and entertainment writer, contributing editor to Mix magazine, and author to-be living in San Francisco.
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