The Road (2009): B+

Whereas Cormac McCarthy is an author to whom cynicism comes easy, director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) is a filmmaker whose doubt about mankind’s capacity for good comes laced with a tinge of humanistic hopefulness. And while McCarthy’s curt, hard prose best reflects his worldview’s bleakness, Hillcoat’s direction of the novelist’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road captures, with assuredness and sincerity, both the compassionate as well as the cold found in McCarthy’s tale about a father (Viggo Mortensen) and his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) traversing a post-apocalyptic American wasteland. In adapting the Oprah-celebrated book, Hillcoat (working with screenwriter Joe Penhall) hews closely to the letter, which concerns his hobo vagabond protagonists – filthy, dressed in ragged coats and shoes, hauling their scavenged goods in a rickety shopping cart – avoiding cannibalistic marauders, thieves, and the equally dangerous wet and chill of a world burned to a char years earlier by a mysterious, all-consuming fire. For those familiar with McCarthy’s tome, there are no narrative surprises to be found along the film’s journey, only diligent recreations of the story’s unhurried, relatively uneventful incidents.

Yet whereas the written Road was a remote affair punctuated by a climax of clunky, deflated pathos, this cinematic version is a nearly exact opposite with regards to both thematic and emotional resonance. Hillcoat’s periodic flashbacks to Mortensen’s father and his wife (Charlize Theron), scenes marked by a fixation on both hands and offhand details (a screen door closing; an empty, swaying hammock), have a warm tactility that’s almost unbearable when contrasted with his ashen, world-gone-sour panoramas of the debris-strewn topography. The director’s supple, telling juxtapositions of piercing close-ups and ominous images of the vast, desolate CG-ified environs create heightened tension between interior and exterior spaces. Moreover, his cast’s performances radiate the fear, longing, and desperation that felt at a remove in McCarthy’s novel. Via quiet glances and intimate gestures and embraces unsullied by expressive chitchat, Mortensen and newcomer Smit-McPhee express the intrinsically entwined needs of father and child, the way in which parental actions teach morality far more than words do, and the necessity of casting aside said morality in service of protection and survival.

Here as in The Proposition, Hillcoat’s gritty, slightly unreal-looking landscapes capture a sense of the natural world’s horrifying beauty (or is it beautiful horror?), of the capacity for both violence and kindness – sometimes at the same moment – in both man and his milieu. Beholden as it is to its downward-sloping source material, The Road can’t fully overcome its one-note construction. However, in the boy confirming and reconfirming that he and his father are “good guys” (terms used, on the father’s part, to establish a moral order within a void), or of the boy rebuking his father’s attempt to claim the sole weight of responsibility, Hillcoat’s film captures the raw, frantic, heartbreaking human dimension that felt overly interiorized and muffled in McCarthy’s book. A story not just of indestructible parental commitment but the extremes to which that devotion will drive one, it’s a cinematic adaptation at once faithful and superior to its source material, a severe ode to the depths of fatherly love whose heart lies in Mortensen’s tremulous eyes, where misery, benevolence, hope and madness all seem to simultaneously cohabitate.

Comments

[Tricia]

Good God, what a gorgeous review. Now I have figure out how to turn "I was bored" into something a bit more eloquent.

[Nick]

You're far too kind, Tricia. But thanks...and good luck!

[Mark E]

I waited for dvd, sorry.

Never read the novel; decided to wait for the film. I loved The Proposition, so that may have had something to do with it.

Great movie for those with a (somewhat) die view of our humanity. I found the film to be enjoyable in its unflinching approach to its subject matter; that being the horror associated with being a human being.

Having read the novel since, id say its the best film adaptation i could really have hoped for.

Endless hopelessness plagued by instinctual optimisim . Fatigue inducing as it may be, id argue that both formats of the story to be foremost, relevant works(s) these days...these days...these days...