The Road
2009 (USA)
Director: John Hillcoat
Viewed: December 3, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)
B - Much of the unexpected power of No Country For Old Men arrives in its final fifteen minutes or so, as an arguably perfect thriller evolves into a profoundly moving rumination on justice, ethics, and, most devastatingly, the role of parents as surrogate gods in a cold, empty world. These themes are front-and-center in The Road, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by No Country author Cormac McCarthy. The film adaptation of The Road veritably howls the despairing thoughts that Sheriff Ed Tom Bell only murmured. I’m reluctant to criticize director John Hillcoat—whose previous film was the spit-and-gristle Aussie Western The Proposition—for the film’s bracingly straightforward treatment of its central concern: namely, the deity-mortal corollaries in the parent-child relationship. Bracingly straightforward, after all, is McCarthy’s preferred approach in his novel, and Hillcoat’s film is nothing if not a remarkably faithful preservation of both the letter and spirit of the source material. Accordingly, what The Road delivers is one of the grimmest, bleakest, most emotionally draining stories in contemporary narrative fiction. It is not, needless to say, a corking good time at the movies. It is, however, a poignant, sharply realized work that starkly tackles moral dilemmas that have troubled humanity for millennia.
The potency of The Road lies within its central visual: a man (Viggo Mortensen) and a boy (Kodi Smith-McPhee), bedraggled and malnourished, trudge through an ashen wasteland pushing a shopping cart that contains their meager possessions. The Man and Boy (they are never given names) are nomads in a lifeless wilderness that was once the United States of America. Ten years ago, there were booming sounds, a flash of light, and fires that burned through the night. The precise nature of this apocalypse doesn’t really matter, either to the scattered survivors or to the story that Hillcoat is striving to tell. For a decade, the world has slowly been dying. The sky is perpetually overcast, plant and animal life have nearly vanished, and most of the remaining humans have turned to roaming the highways in armed, cannibalistic gangs. The Boy, who was born shortly after the world changed, has known only this benighted existence. His mother, the Man’s wife (Charlize Theron) is gone now, her despair prompting her to choose death in the darkness over rape and murder at the hands of others.
Despite appearances, The Road is not any sort of dystopian action-adventure film. Most of its narrative is occupied with the quiet banalities of the Man and Boy’s search for food, and occasionally with their evasion of other survivors. Yet Hillcoat nonetheless maintains a sense of urgency and desperation, calling to mind the tone of a gritty escape picture… except in this case there is nowhere to escape to. There is only the Man’s anxious need to keep moving, always south and towards the coast, for no particular reason other than to avoid the risks of remaining in one place for too long. Even in such unremittingly desolate circumstances, the Man believes it is vital to teach his son something like a moral code, to distinguish the Good Guys like themselves from the Bad Guys that wander the wastes with minds full of hunger and murder. The ethical dialog between Man and Boy, and how it ricochets off the people and situations that they encounter, comprises both the film’s character development and its out-in-the-open exploration of theme.
The apocalypse that The Road envisions is admittedly contrivance. It sweeps away the accumulated bullshit of civilization by, well, just sweeping it away, and then poses fundamental questions of human morality in the most visceral terms possible. What does it mean to be good? How much do suspicion and cynicism limit our opportunity to help others? How do our words and actions convey our values to the next generation? This frankness to the film’s purpose might have been off-putting, especially given that the scenario it presents is one that is utterly without hope. (Give it a moment’s consideration and it becomes apparent that humanity will necessarily go extinct as the last morsels of preserved food are scavenged.) Hillcoat, however, discovers the invigoration and sorrowful fascination inherent in a story stripped down to its most elemental components. And narratives don’t get more elemental than A Father and Son Try to Survive.
The Road is not really a science-fiction film, if only because the nitty-gritty details of its apocalyptic event are completely ignored. Yet it fulfills one of the essential criteria of speculative visions of the future, in that it uses its setting to explore contemporary mores. It’s readily apparent that Hillcoat, absorbing and utilizing the creased cynicism of McCarthy’s novel, intends that The Road not really be taken as a story of The Future at all, but as a timeless tale of the struggle against moral darkness and the essential role of the parent-child relationship in that struggle. The not-so-subtle implication is that The Road’s nightmare world of blight and brutality is only a slight exaggeration of the world we are dwelling in right now. This notion lurks in the picture, but it never presses itself upon the viewer, partly because the Man and Boy’s plight is so immediate, partly because Hillcoat paints such a dire landscape with such believability. It’s a world of perpetual, ash-flecked winter, the miserable punchline to civilization. The blasted environs of Mount St. Helens and the Hurricane Katrina-lashed Gulf Coast stand in for this crumbling world, but you’d never know it. It’s in the obvious computer-generated shots that the illusion frays.
The Man is the sort of role that Viggo Mortenson excels at, and it’s difficult to imagine the film, for all of Hillcoat’s capable craftsmanship, functioning even remotely as well without him. Mortenson is able to hold resolve and self-doubt in a character at the same time, and here he puts that skill to great effect. He has the ability to portray paternal devotion with unashamed white-hot purity, without rendering it schmaltzy. When he whispers to another traveler of uncertain intentions, “This boy is my god,” we don’t doubt him for a second. One can’t blame Mortensen for the slightness that clings to the film, its searing emotional content notwithstanding. It’s not that Hillcoat’s treatment of the story is precisely perfunctory, but that he doesn’t enliven its dismal and straightforward parameters with the artistic deftness necessary to lend it a a greater thematic or psychological intricacy. The Road’s success thus rests primarily on its precisely drawn premise and the uncluttered and emotionally forthright execution of that premise.
Tags: Adaptations, Family Matters, Gloom and Doom
[...] At Gateway Cinephiles, Missouri’s finest film critic, Andrew Wyatt, apparently has som every good things to say about The Road, which needs to be read: http://gatewaycinephiles.com/2009/12/05/here-at-the-end-of-all-things/ [...]
Andrew, I didn’t feel that case of “urgency and desparation” and felt this film veered dangerously close to the horror genre with its ghoulish set pieces and lugubrious pace. It’s a kind of apocalyptic tone poem based on the popular novel by Cormac McCarthy (which I read in its entirety shortly after it appeared and rather liked) but the film for me was a dull, flavorless, one-note treatise that some have praised, yourself included -largely because of a touching final coda- and others have dismissed. There’s little insight into behavior as there is in the novel, and basically this is an incohesive lot of distancing sequences, impressively filmed but with no direction. I have usually rallied behind bleak, apocalyptic films (Children of Men, Time of the Wolf) but this is a deadening and predictable journey that resembles the conventional horror film in tone and narrative. Surprisingly, the otherwise gifted Cave and Ellis’s score is overwrought. But that’s my opinion. What is far more important is that you have defended this film with your typical consumate skill and enthusiasm as a writer and insightful movie goer. At the end of the day there are more people agreeing with you than with me in regard to this film. While I kind of laughed at Duvall, I completely agree with you on Mortenson, who gave a vigorous, affecting performance.
This passage here is terrific:
“It’s readily apparent that Hillcoat, absorbing and utilizing the creased cynicism of McCarthy’s novel, intends that The Road not really be taken as a story of The Future at all, but as a timeless tale of the struggle against moral darkness and the essential role of the parent-child relationship in that struggle. The not-so-subtle implication is that The Road’s nightmare world of blight and brutality is only a slight exaggeration of the world we are dwelling in right now.”
Great review Andrew. I read the book but I haven’t seen the movie yet. If this movie can capture 75% of the book’s spirit and mood then I’ll consider it a success. I don’t particularly envy Hillcoat’s challenge in turning this book into film. The book is just brilliant; making a movie just as brilliant is a tall order.
I’m particularly interested in seeing Mortenson as the Man; he may very well be one of only a handful of actors who could pull off this role. It’s actually one of the reasons I’m so eager to see this film.
I hear it’s out on Blu-ray this spring; I’m waiting for it with both trepidation and excitement. Trepidation because it’s just so damn emotionally battering; excitement because this father and son love story is just so damn beautiful.
Brian:
I think it’s a safe bet to assume that if you liked the novel, you’ll liked the film. I don’t the film is an unqualified success, for the reasons I elucidated in my review, but I would also add that time has made me come around to the notion that this may be the best “faithful” adaptation of McCarthy’s novel we could have hoped for: good but not great. There’s a better movie in the novel somewhere, but it would require quite a bit of rejiggering of the source material. The Coens took No Country For Old Men, a great novel, and turned it into a cinematic masterpiece precisely because they knew exactly where McCarthy’s sensibilities and their own overlapped, and where they complemented one another. Hillcoat isn’t doing anything so daring. His vision of the The Road is just a reverent filmic version of the novel’s substantive and emotional core. Good stuff, just not great.
“Mortenson is able to hold resolve and self-doubt in a character at the same time, and here he puts that skill to great effect. He has the ability to portray paternal devotion with unashamed white-hot purity, without rendering it schmaltzy.”
Succinctly put. This is precisely what makes this film work. It’s what made the book work. His ability to embody the character from the page so completely and so convincingly was absolutely crucial if the film had any chance at all of capturing the crux of this story.
I feel this story is about fatherhood, more importantly being a good father, and really nothing else. Whatever other social commentary might lie within doesn’t really matter in comparison. McCarthy said that the book was a love story to his son; and in reading this book it couldn’t be more obvious. His description of this father and son as “each the other’s world entire” tells us all we really need to know. I think you more expressively say that here “It’s readily apparent that Hillcoat, absorbing and utilizing the creased cynicism of McCarthy’s novel, intends that The Road not really be taken as a story of The Future at all, but as a timeless tale of the struggle against moral darkness and the essential role of the parent-child relationship in that struggle.’
And with fatherhood being the crux of the story it affected me much more profoundly, I believe, than it would have had I no children.
You’re right about the contrivance of the apocalypse; stripping away all the bullshit of the world left McCarthy with the ability to focus on the father and son dynamic. No “quaint concerns” to get in the way. How do I provide for my children? Am I making the right choices for them? Have I taught them enough to be self-sufficient when I’m gone? Will my children be able to determine the difference between right and wrong?
Most importantly he asks “why keep going?”
The Man and The Woman represent both sides of a moral delimma: admit defeat and give up or keep going despite the absence of hope. McCarthy is able to convincingly argue both sides yet chooses one to explore and show us. This is the entire foundation for the simultaneous “resolve and self-doubt” as you said within The Man. He’s not convinced he’s right, but he’s made a decision and he’ll see it through to the end.
There were several scenes in the book that the movie really got right. The Man discovering the Coca-Cola in the machine and giving it to The Boy as a “treat”. It captured how necessary this gesture was to the man, to be able to provide nice things for his son, while juxtaposing it against the paltry and pathetic conditions in which this gift was given. How frustrating and demoralizing it must be to want to provide for one’s children while not having the means to do so. Simple, brilliant, and effective.
The scene when The Man woke suddenly and immediately felt to see if The Boy was still breathing. The Man looking at the boy’s trinkets in the bomb shelter, trying to learn a little about the boy he loves so much yet hasn’t the luxury to really get to know. The Man washing a dead man’s brains out of his son’s hair. “I’ll kill anyone who touches you”, he says. Such a brutal yet beautiful statement of devotion and love.
Even some of the scenes that were modified, like the scene where The Man and The Boy find the people being held in the basement for food, worked. It increased the suspense for the movie audience and introduced visually the man’s worst fear of having to kill his own son. Difficult to ponder and really difficult to watch.
I wish, however, Hillcoat hadn’t downplayed The Boy’s near-death sickness at the beach. That event, in my opinion, pushed The Man to the brink. He was changed after that, and his treatment of The Thief helped demonstrate that. Also, adding the living bug at the burned-out amusement park betrayed the bleakness and hopelessness of the novel. It felt like a concession, like he was throwing a bone to the audience to lessen the tremendous despair he’d just given them.
But honestly, I’m not sure it’s possible to transfer the full weight and depth of the story to the screen. Being a person much more interested in books than movies I typically find this to be the case with virtually every book adaptation. While there may be a better movie within those pages somewhere, I don’t believe that any movie has the ability to rival or exceed the book. Having said that, this movie gets more right than it gets wrong, and I’d have to agree overall with how you scored this film.