If you’ve seen John Hillcoat’s previous film – the excellent, if frequently difficult-to-watch The Proposition – or read Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road, you have some idea of what to expect from this film version. You also might have no desire whatsoever to watch this movie.
The Road is cold, miserable, relentlessly grim; there’s no joy and little hope in this post-apocalyptic tale of a father and son travelling to the coast in search of, well, something better that may or may not exist. The landscape is covered in ash and death, the skies are gray and so is everything else, the film so drained of color that it may as well be black & white.
It’s a near-great adaptation. Not quite there, because it can’t hope to compare to McCarthy’s words, which reached poetry in their sparseness, and because the situation the characters are in is so decidedly uncinematic that the screen becomes impenetrable. But this is a post-apocalyptic film unlike any other, so neorealist in its approach to the material that you have to reserve some degree of admiration for it.
The father and son – figures who never given proper names – are impressively played by Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-Mcphee as tired and starving, at the end of their rope and near death. The father has fleeting glimpses of a past world, green pastures and a wife (Charlize Theron); the boy was born into this misery and knows nothing better. Dad keeps a handgun and two last bullets, and teaches his son how to put it in his mouth and pull the trigger, just in case.
There’s no drive to the material, no real narrative or suspense, but that doesn’t keep Hillcoat from trying: he films the journey of the man and the boy through a series of vignettes, notable moments in the journey that each have their own power but don’t add up to a cohesive plot. There’s the group of armed raiders they encounter, a house of cannibals, the last can of coke from a vending machine, an old man (Robert Duvall), a thief (Michael K. Williams).
The film was originally slated for a release in 2008, then delayed a year for additional post-production work; this can account for Mortensen’s unnecessary and infrequent voice-over narration, and some inexplicably lighter music on the soundtrack (there should, of course, be no music; the credits roll over ambient sounds of sprinklers and lawnmowers, times long gone.) The studio must have realized what they had and attempted to make it more palatable, but there was no escape.
The feel, and the setting, is what makes The Road. Cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe is truly “hauntingly beautiful,” turning a landscape of dust into something picture-perfect. It’s an impeccable production, something few will want to watch, but it couldn’t have been done any other way. Those that do sit through it will be richly rewarded.
Ultimately, The Road is memorable in its bleakness, its realistic approach to a genre that has become known for campy fun. It’ll be hard to look at a post-apocalyptic movie (see: The Book of Eli) the same. It lives in the shadow of the source novel, but what could live up to it? This is, at the very least, an earnest attempt.
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