Well, let’s just get this out of the way now. John Hillcoat’s The Road joins a growing club of movies adapted from Cormac McCarthy novels. Billy Bob Thornton was the first on the scene with his not-so-acclaimed vision of All The Pretty Horses (2000), but it was the Coen brothers’ masterful No Country for Old Men (2007) that effectively started the trend. So with two adaptations behind it and two on the horizon (the highly anticipated Blood Meridian slated for 2011 and Cities of the Plain for 2012), the question is: does The Road help mark McCarthy as one of the literary greats for filmic fodder? (I’d give you a clear thumbs-up/thumbs-down answer but my thumbs were blown off in the apocalypse.)
Hillcoat manages to make a two-hour movie from a repetitive book (walk, walk, walk, hide, cannibals, repeat) pretty damn interesting. He sets a relatively quick pace by eliding all the book’s events that involve other people and reducing the monotonous drudgery of traveling on the road into voiced-over montages and dream sequences.
The film starts with a montage introducing the viewer to the bleakness of the new world. We see the man (Viggo Mortensen), the boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and in flashbacks, the wife/mother (Charlize Theron). After the title we jump right into the action. The man and the boy wake up in a broken station wagon outside a tunnel at the sound of a diesel engine coming through the tunnel. The father’s instincts take over and he has the boy out of the car and scrambling through the leafless and lifeless woods to take cover in a small ravine. The truck’s engine sputters and gives out right in front of their shopping cart (full of their blankets and provisions). When one of the hillbilly cannibals steps off the road to take a leak, he finds himself unzipped in the sight of the man’s revolver. The cannibal attempts to convince the two loners to join his group, but the man, cautious as ever, won’t fall for it. The cannibal pulls a knife and grabs hold of the boy, leaving the man no choice but to spend one of his last two bullets. The man carries the boy away and they hide until the coast is clear. All their things are gone.
The two face starvation constantly, forcing them to investigate any house or town they find near the road. As they journey south, always south, they have another close call with cannibals. This time, having wandered into a house in search of food, they stumble into a cellar full of naked, broken human beings that will soon be eaten. The man and the boy must hide upstairs as the group of cannibals returns, armed with shotguns and rifles. Trapped in the bathroom on the brink of death, we see the real value of the last bullet: the man holds the gun up to his son’s head, unwilling to let him suffer the fate of those trapped in the cellar. But they escape, to carry on the torch, ‘cause they’re the good guys.
The father’s dreams get heavier and heavier, which he says means that there is still hope. He tells his son that when you start dreaming of good things the end is near. We see the man and his pregnant wife discussing whether or not to go through with having a child. He dreams of the moment when his wife put their last two bullets on the table and tried to persuade the man to take his son and wife’s lives before “they” came to rape, kill, and eat them (the son draws on a wall in the background during this conversation). In dreams, the mother’s stark take on reality always contrasts the father’s optimism—his hope for some sort of life for his son.
The colorless desolate world that the pair moves through wears on the man. The compassionate boy wants to help travelers they see (thieves or loners) and the father grows ever embittered and jaded, finally causing the boy to question what it means to be “the good guys” if they can’t even help a starving man. The reach the coast and find it as dark and depressing as everything else they’ve seen. The movie ends with the opportunity for some kind of life for the boy, even if no rays of hope for mankind are able to the penetrate the bleak ash cloud covering the planet.
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis collaborate with Hillcoat again (see The Proposition, 2007) to make a soundtrack that is, at times, as haunting as the movie. The soundtrack occasionally falls flat by being too far removed from the gruesome reality of the post-apocalypse, an effect that jarred me out of the movie’s gripping intensity.
I give The Road 3.5 of 5 stars and recommend seeing it. Viggo Mortensen’s acting is almost always spot-on, and his harrowed appearance matches the barren landscape perfectly. The movie takes some small liberties with the book’s plot, but I think all the changes are valid. (In fact, I like the movie better than the book. That’s right, I said it.) If I haven’t used this word enough in the review, know that this movie is a bleak story of what a father will do out of love for his son. It has a convincing atmosphere created by an unrelentingly godforsaken landscape, solid acting, and a decent soundtrack, but for some reason this movie isn’t stunning. There are enough brief moments of disappointment in the script, the acting, and the music to keep this good movie from being a great movie.
