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Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.
All Critics (23) | Top Critics (11) | Fresh (10) | Rotten (13)
A strangely tepid experience for such searing psychological material.
There's a strange heft to its hollowness.
"Big Sur" cracks the code of how to adapt Jack Kerouac for the screen.
Sometimes feels like a beautiful illustration, rather than an adaptation, of Kerouac's prose.
With Kerouac declaring that "the only thing that matters is the conceptions in my own mind," we're still left waiting for the filmmaker who can take us there.
Nobody's given the opportunity to do much more than brood prettily and occasionally shout carpe diembromides into the pounding surf.
The film is driven by narration taken from passages of Kerouac's own prose, which celebrate the enthusiasm and passion he holds for life while his addictions eat away at his body and mind.
Ultimately, Big Sur demonstrates the limitations of Kerouac's text, how personal it is to each reader and how unsatisfactory it feels on the big screen.
An ingenious way to bring the story to life, such an experimental visual form's potential to captivate might leave something to be desired.
...works as a kind of tone poem, drenching the senses in beautifully sad imagery, as Kerouac's poetry and prose sound over images of the sparkling Pacific.
Clearly edited to evoke a feeling of slipstream, stream-of-consciousness connection, but little more than a rolling delivery service of smugness, self-destruction, hedonism and pretentiousness.
Big Sur rises and fades, shifts and moves, through movements and melodies, singing a beautifully sad song for an era and a man who lost his way.
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