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"Performance and image—that's what it's all about." The horizontal structure gives a snapshot of Route 66, beginning at night in California and finishing with a Tennessee flare, as befits this record of a film being made (cf. Coppola's The Rain People). The Driver (James Taylor) and the Mechanic (Dennis Wilson), young highway hustlers mated in spiritual neurasthenia and gear-head lingo, with the hitchhiker (Laurie Bird) they form a triangle, sort of. Their Bressonisms are contrasted with the garrulous self-mythologizing of the middle-aged dropout (Warren Oates), who's a TV producer or a secret jet flier or a Korean War vet, a different identity for every passenger. Gray Chevy versus yellow Pontiac GTO, "some kind of masculine power trip?" Vast vistas outside and hermetic frames within, Monte Hellman's metaphysical hot rod, one of the most concentrated American dreams. Severe camera placement is key to beautifully compact arrangements of diner jukeboxes, Coke coolers in gas stations, turned-away figures in drizzly garages. Kris Kristofferson on the radio plays Greek chorus ("Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose"), meanwhile the Driver tries and fails to charm the Girl with a feeble metaphor about cicadas. Racing for pink slips, rattling around landscapes, toasting out of trunks. "Here's to your destruction." "Same to you." The proximity to Zabriskie Point is palpable, Kings of the Road scans the Old World horizon. Wordless connections and departures, continuous movement as an attempt to ward off loneliness, the mirage of a home when the widescreen is a windshield. "If I'm not grounded pretty soon, I'm gonna go into orbit." Graveyard pit-stop and hamburger and Alka-Seltzer and gay cowboy (Harry Dean Stanton), the summit of early Seventies eloquence. "Journeys end in lovers meeting," otherwise the way out of the Möbius strip is by literally burning the celluloid that runs through the projector. Cinematography by Jack Deerson and Gregory Sandor.
--- Fernando F. Croce |