Column: 'The Road' a long, dreary trek
Published Dec. 1, 2009
Although moviegoers in 2009 might feel comfortably distant from the Cold War days of fall-out shelters and duck-and-cover drills, Cormac McCarthy (author of the source material for "The Road") has conjured up a post-apocalyptic world so grim it will have the most ardent "2012" skeptics shaking in their boots.
The film adaptation of McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Road" is a haunting look at an unnamed father and son as they journey through the treacherous remains of a dead world in search of necessities and ultimately the coast.
Compared to its acclaimed source material, this is a flawed adaptation with a cumbersome slow-burn pace and incessant questions that are never answered. Although it might not be as masterful as the novel, performances by Viggo Mortensen and the young but impressive Kodi Smit-McPhee elevate "The Road" to an evocative, if sometimes difficult, study in human nature that sticks with you.
The images of our assumed future are at once harrowing and moving. The father and son watch the majestic fire of a rotting forest and bask in a glorious waterfall after outrunning cannibalistic survivors. The bone-chillingly grotesque moments of suffering are matched with warmer scenes, such as when the father and son feast in a discovered bomb shelter.
The trick of "The Road," though, is you never feel too comfortable. Like McCarthy's dark novel, director John Hillcoat has crafted a no-man's land where Hollywood sap and comfort are thrown out the window. This movie is out to unnerve you.
Watching Mortensen is heartbreaking. There's an especially poignant moment when he returns to his childhood home and clutches a couch cushion, and you know he's really holding on for dear life to some trace of his humanity. These questions about what makes us human are hard to swallow, but Mortensen does his part in making them edible at all.
Unfortunately for those who have not read the novel, a sense of frustration might be the only thing that sticks with them. The apocalyptic events are implied off-screen, and we return to the immediately proceeding aftermath through short flashbacks of Mortensen and wife Charlize Theron, who kills herself shortly after giving birth to their son. The fog of this murky plot is thickened by a script short on dialogue, forgoing extensive conversations between the father and son in favor of long, dreary shots of their trek to the coast.
Hillcoat creates the ambience of the desolate road with the landscape of barren forests and long-abandoned structures, making each shot a discomfortingly bleak window into a cold, dead future. But unlike most films portraying a post-apocalyptic backdrop, the most unnerving moments of ragged desperation are achieved quietly, thanks to the worse-for-wear faces of Mortensen and Smit-McPhee.
Their subtly nuanced performances create a lyrical language to replace McCarthy's words and give life to the novel's moody ambiguity. True to the novel, it's bleakly horrifying and mysteriously uplifting and certainly worth a closer look.