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November 1, 2013

Spotlight: Big Sur


Photo Courtesy of Ketchup Entertainment

Editors' Notes

Kate Bosworth as Billie in a film still from Big Sur.

Photo Courtesy of Ketchup Entertainment

Editors' Notes

Jean-Marc Barr as Jack Kerouac in a film still from Big Sur.

Photo Courtesy of Ketchup Entertainment

Editors' Notes

Jean-Marc Barr as Jack Kerouac in a film still from Big Sur.

Photo Credit: Lisa Eisner

Editors' Notes

Bosworth wears an Isabel Marant coat, $2,005, and Vera Wang gown, price upon request.

Photo Credit: Lisa Eisner

Editors' Notes

Polish wears a Rag & Bone waistcoat, $325, and shirt, $255.

Photo Credit: Lisa Eisner

Editors' Notes

Bosworth wears a Miu Miu jacket, $2,190, and pants, $1,670. Polish wears a Gucci outer cardigan, $2,990, jacket, $1,990, and thin-rib cardigan, $795.

Photo Credit: Lisa Eisner

Editors' Notes

Bosworth wears a Valentino coat, $5,490.

Photo Credit: Lisa Eisner

Editors' Notes

Bosworth wears a Paul & Joe Sister cardigan, $295. La Perla bra, $192.

Photo Credit: Lisa Eisner

Editors' Notes

Polish wears his own henley, jeans, and sunglasses.

Photo Credit: Lisa Eisner

Editors' Notes

Bosworth wears a Rag & Bone topcoat, price upon request. Polish wears a Rag & Bone waistcoat, shirt, and trousers, $325, Saks Fifth Avenue. The Frye Company shoes, $298.

Kate Bosworth plays one of the coterie of women surrounding Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady in director Michael Polish’s new film, Big Sur (Ketchup Entertainment), based on the Beat poet’s novel of the same name. The meandering book, filled with page-long sentences—broken only by scores of dashes—contains riffs on nature, melancholy, and madness. And the film, opening today in select theaters, uses those very words and successfully integrates them seamlessly into conversations and voiceovers in a way that other motion pictures about the Beats haven’t managed. The movie was shot on the bleak Northern California coast near Bixby Bridge, where Kerouac stayed in the ’50s, and it contains glorious images of the rolling fog, jagged cliffs, the desolate churning sea and the lonely cabin owned by City Lights’ Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The novel Big Sur chronicles Kerouac’s alter ego, Jack Duluoz, as he returns to the West Coast three years after publishing his first novel. As the film begins, Kerouac (played by Jean-Marc Barr) is confronting the new reality of his life as a published writer and literary star. He’s become famous and is sought out by a younger generation eager to tap into the type of life Kerouac led in On the Road: endless nights of racing cars, drunken reveries, poetry readings, and jazz performances. Ferlinghetti (played by Anthony Edwards) offers Kerouac his cabin as an escape from the people, press, and the bottle.

Though the novelist is older now, and he’s tired, Kerouac falls back into the same patterns in the Bay Area. Benders in North Beach are followed by days spent trying to dry out in Big Sur or hitting the bottle even more frequently. Kerouac’s friend and mentor-of-sorts, Neal Cassady (played by Josh Lucas), has taken to domestic life with his wife Carolyn (Radha Mitchell) in Los Gatos. But, true to form, Cassady—who never met a blonde he didn’t eye—is also seeing Billie, a mistress played by Bosworth, in San Francisco. He introduces her to Kerouac and the two try to hash out some semblance of a relationship. “You’re tired of life,” says Billie. And she’s right. Kerouac looks exhausted as he alternates between gazing at the panoramic blanket of redwood trees over his head in Big Sur and guzzling bottles of port in San Francisco. His friends ask whether he’s written anything lately. He hasn’t. Back in Big Sur, he’s caught in a state of near paralysis. “I can’t sleep, I can’t sit, I can’t pace,” says Kerouac. He also pulls away from everyone, including Billie. “Can it be I am withholding something sacred from her just like she says?” he asks himself while staring at Billie walking fully-clothed into the sea. “Or am I just a fool who will never learn to have a decent eternally-minded deep-down, relation with a woman and keep throwing that away for a song and a bottle?” Billie asks the writer, “Why can’t you follow through with what’s good and right and true?” Kerouac counters with a desperate scream: “I’ve been playing like a happy child with words words words all my life in a big serious tragedy. Look around!” The film is a heartbreaking look at an alcoholic author losing faith in his art and in himself as endless thoughts about death and peace thrash around in his unstable mind like the waves he watches on the rocks below.

by Elizabeth Varnell

Pictured: Kate Bosworth and Michael Polish. Mulberry poncho, $625. On Polish: Guess T-shirt.
Photo by Lisa Eisner

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