When it was announced that Australian director John Hillcoat would be taking up the challenge of bringing the bleak and difficult novel, The Road, to the screen it seemed liked the absolute perfect match of director and material. After all, his gritty and fly-coated outback western The Proposition had that right mix of apocalyptic and tender that is the essence of Cormac McCarthy’s prose (the crisp non-nonsense sentences are as sparsely worded as any book that I have read, yet finds power and poetry in its repetition). And are not many post-apocalypse survival movies similar in tone and execution to the modern anti-western? Make no mistake, this is a handsome, consistent and harrowing adaptation of the work, but it is not quite a filmic masterpiece because I fear the novel as it is, is not translatable from the written page to the screen. There is something about letting the immediacy of each small sentence in the book sink in slowly, whereas Hillcoat and co. have only 2 short hours with with to pain their gray portrait of a world in ruin. It is a faithful adaptation of the book to be sure, many of the “Day After Tomorrow” images in the gawd-awful trailer cut by the Weinstein Company are (thankfully) not in the in the film, and any scars or signs of its length (and likely troubled) production history are not evident on screen. Rest assured that The Road is the quiet and intimate drama, and very likely to be the bleakest multiplex movie of 2009 (should the distributor finally stop shuffling it back in the calender again and again) as it should be; yet, nevertheless between book and screenplay, something of the soul was lost in translation.
Some final apocalypse, be it nuclear war or climate change, it is never clear what, has smashed civilation into only a fraction of the population and no civilized order exist. All the animals and trees are dead, and the only surviving species are insects and humans. It is winter. With no crops or animals, and presumably half a decade or more passing the only food source (and it is not even a plentiful one) seems to be other humans. An unnamed doctor (Viggo Mortensen) and his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) wander a hazy-smoky landscape where everything is dead they are slowly starving to death. Father tenderly teaches his son how to commit suicide with their pistol in case any of the roving gangs of cannibals by day and reads him childrens books by the warm glow of the fire at night.
The iconic image of a charcoal horizon and two small figures, parent and child, pushing a cart of few, precious belongings through the snow is a powerful one, and it is contrasted by warm moments at night. This is interestingly the opposite of most films of this type, where the night is much more dangerous, here it is someone spotting you during the day that is the biggest danger, beyond starvation. There several human encounters punctuate a journey to ‘the coast’ which hopefully has some sort of sanctuary for the emaciated duo. Alternating between the full blown horror of people butchering other people for food, to lone travelers like Robert Duvall or Michael Kenneth Williams (that would be the actor who played Omar Little from the Wire), that shuffle forward only because that is the only thing left to do. How each of these two encounters play out shows the poetry of the piece. The doctor wants his young son to be able to defend and fend for himself, but also (and perhaps more importantly) he needs to protect his son’s innocence as it is the only thing left keeping him from turning into one of the lost, blank foot shufflers. Even the suicide of his wife (cameo flashbacks feature a grave but gorgeous Charlize Theron opting for the group suicide option many chose as the world went into its rocky slide into savagery in slow motion) is made bearable by the survival of his sons ‘flame.’
The film is very, very good though, my only complaints are minor. Perhaps Kodi Smit-McPhee is a bit old to be playing the what I assumed was a 6 year old; Smit-McPhee is 10 and it seems he should be a bit more capable. Also, a curious action set-piece (mercifully short) involving falling trees and an earthquake, something that plays onscreen like an Indiana Jones or Universal Studios tour-ride break the steady rhythm of story. These are so minor they are barely worth mentioning, other than that they are two of the only deviations from the novel. I’m not opting for ‘perfectly faithful’ adaptations (although the Coen Brother’s take on No Country For Old Men is nearly a word perfect adaptation, and that film may even be better than its source novel.)
So why would anyone watch something so depressing and gray? The movie answers the question in an interesting way with a bit of dialogue. If we are still having bad dreams, and make no mistake, The Road (or Michael Haneke’s analogous yet even bleaker (and better) Time of the Wolf) is one of those bad dreams, then there is something left fighting for; it is when people only want to have good dreams, block out reality, that things are lost.
If you want to watch it onl1ne for free,...
I’m all about lanes.
Comment by Rusty James — November 24, 2009
Comment by Kurt — November 25, 2009
Comment by Rick — November 25, 2009
As for the movie, it cracked my top five of the year so far. I have no complaints, really, and while I’ll still recommend people read the book before I recommend the movie, I think Hillcoat did an excellent job of translating it and making it his own and Viggo was, as usual, perfection. It was also really cool seeing my hometown in the movie (Erie, PA) as well as the sign for Conneaut Lake Park, an obscure, tiny old park around where I grew up.
Comment by Jonathan B. — November 29, 2009
Comment by Andrew James — November 30, 2009
Comment by Jonathan B. — November 30, 2009
It’s a good film though, even if it is not a ‘masterpiece’ which many expected.
I do think people may remember this one, because there are not too many ‘bleak blockbusters.’
Comment by Kurt — November 30, 2009
Comment by Andrew James — November 30, 2009
Luck is such a big part of life and of moviemaking. To have the manuscript of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road fall into my lap before it was published was an example. I had no idea that the book would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize and become the most translated book of modern time. It so profoundly moved me that I knew back then it was a great gift carrying a huge responsibility.
My last movie, The Proposition, was inspired by McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. But with The Road Cormac surpassed even my expectations. It is the most poignant love story between a father and son that I know of, so I wanted to above all respect the book and his work, to be authentic and not ‘Hollywoodize’ it, to use great restraint and focus upon its core qualities. Of course it also meant leaping off a cliff and not knowing how I would land—but I made damn sure to take an extraordinary cast and crew with me. They went there because they shared the same feeling for the material—a timely parable about human goodness, about kindness.
The brave and heartbreaking work of Viggo Mortensen as ‘the man’ and Kodi Smit-Mcphee as ‘the boy’ was the key to such a story—they both had nowhere to hide. Charlize Theron makes you understand and feel for an impossible position as ‘the woman’. Every other character the man and boy meet was loaded with extra significance since they meet so few, so only a great cast could carry us through.
The Road is also about civilization’s slow death where disaster is made to feel physically and spiritually real—it’s literally apocalypse now. My brilliant key creative crew lead us to over 50 different locations, across four States in the heart of winter, took us to the sources—Mount St. Helens, Pennsylvania strip mines, New Orleans post-Katrina clean up.
The power of McCarthy’s poetic prose will always be near impossible to translate into such a different medium, however we tried to capture the lyricism within the cinematography, a strange majestic beauty in desolate wide shots and real locations, the music, and dialogue taken straight from the book and spoken by talented actors and with the greatest relief we managed to get an unequivocal thumbs up from Cormac himself.
I feel that Cormac’s immense talent lies not only in his poetic language but also in his insightful and unflinching view of humanity when stripped bare, of how people behave under extreme pressure revealing the worst and best in humanity with the precision of a scientist—grace under pressure via great characters and story telling. Above all, this is why I’m personally so attracted to his work as a filmmaker. To me the book felt uncomfortably familiar and uncomfortably real which is why we pursued a naked realism; we thought that was in the spirit of the novel. We hope you also will take the journey and see the movie.
—John Hillcoat, director
Comment by Andrew James — November 30, 2009