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On the road . . . again

The cast of Little Miss Sunshine
  • Posted at 2:46pm
  • 26 October 2007
  • by AndrewCollins-RT

The British road movie is rare. And here's an example of why. 2001's moving and funny Last Orders saw Ray Winstone, Tom Courtenay, David Hemmings and Bob Hoskins driving from south-east London to Margate, on the Kent coast, to scatter Michael Caine's ashes. This journey of 73.5 miles takes just under two hours. If they'd forgotten the urn, they could have turned back at Medway Services and still made it before nightfall.

To compare: last year's surprise indie hit Little Miss Sunshine, in which a dysfunctional family head from Albuquerque in New Mexico to the titular junior beauty pageant in Redondo Beach, California, covers 807.5 miles. It's a journey that supposedly takes around 12 hours, but not if you're in a clapped-out VW bus that provides plenty of opportunity for wacky incident along the way, and necessitates at least one night in a motel for self-reflection. I like both films, but it's clear which one, geographically at least, lays claim to being a proper road movie.

It was by no means the first, but Easy Rider remains definitive of the genre, as two bikers reject the conventions of life for the open road in a gesture of anti-establishment defiance. As a device both metaphorical and physical, the route from A to B remains attractive to film-makers. Abundantly tyre-marked in countercultural times - Vanishing Point, Two-Lane Blacktop - it's seen a renaissance in recent years, with thoughtful midlife crisis films like About Schmidt, Sideways and the sublime Broken Flowers, in which Bill Murray's ageing Lothario revisits four old flames in search of his illegitimate son. And some non-thoughtful ones, like the dim-witted comedy Wild Hogs, which cast Easy Rider's Peter Fonda as . . . an ageing biker.

In the words of the Robert Earl Keen song, the road goes on forever. Sometimes even further than Margate.

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