the blog of nathan loding

The Road (2009)
Star­ring: Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Robert Duvall
Directed by: John Hill­coat
Writ­ten by: Joe Pen­hall, from the novel by Cor­mac McCarthy
Rated: R
Rat­ing: 3 (out of five)

The vision of the world after apoc­a­lypse is noth­ing new to cin­ema.  Nor was it to books when McCarthy’s orig­i­nal book was pub­lished.  A gray world that is des­o­late and fore­bod­ing, ashy and vio­lent.  Gangs run amuck, tak­ing hostages; few good men still exist, the hard­ships of their new life tak­ing obvi­ous tolls.  The dif­fer­ence with The Road is that it’s per­sonal and up-close.

Through flash­backs we are told the his­tory of our two pro­tag­o­nists.  The Man (Mortensen) imme­di­ately begins hoard­ing goods and becom­ing a guardian to the Woman (Char­l­ize Theron), his wife, who is car­ry­ing their child.  The Boy (Smit-McPhee)  is born into the apoc­a­lypse and raised in the dan­ger.  After the death of the Woman, the Man and the Boy begin work­ing their way south towards the coast.

The days are cold, the nights even colder.  The world has been dead for so long that food and clean water are had to come by.  Plant and ani­mal life has been oblit­er­ated, exist­ing cities crum­bled.  The only true infra­struc­ture left in the world is the long, flat pave­ment of the inter­state high­ways – the roads.

We see the world and the action through the eyes of the Man.  He view the Boy as the last hope for the world, the Boy is God.  He does not mean this lit­er­ally; the Boy, good natured and decent and kind, has the power of God in the empty world.  The power to restore hope, even if it’s only restor­ing the Man’s hope and not humanity’s.

Dur­ing their jour­ney they encounter var­i­ous peo­ple on the road.  From vio­lent gangs to can­ni­bals, they work to avoid these Bad Guys as well as they can and still sur­vive.  The need for food leads them into dark houses and places they prob­a­bly oth­er­wise shouldn’t be going.  Threats are con­stant, and the sin­gle pis­tol the Man car­ries two bul­lets for a rea­son.  Part of the Boy’s edu­ca­tion is the proper way to com­mit suicide.

There is some­thing hor­ri­bly dis­turb­ing in that image – the father push­ing a pis­tol into his son’s mouth, then mov­ing it to his own so he can demon­strate the proper aim.  You can’t aim too low or you’ll fail.  There is also some­thing hor­ri­bly famil­iar, and a ter­ri­ble, ter­ri­ble sense that this could be you.

The Road is that real, thanks largely to it’s source mate­r­ial.  I feel almost like I’m writ­ing a review of the book rather than the movie, because the two are so close together.  The images are there and the char­ac­ters are played to per­fec­tion (and I do mean per­fec­tion) by Mortensen and the sup­port­ing cast.  Smit-McPhee is amaz­ing as the Boy, evok­ing for me exactly what McCarthy’s writ­ten rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the Boy was.

Some­thing is lack­ing in the movie, though, some­thing the book has.  Roger Ebert’s review delves into McCarthy’s work and boils down the dif­fer­ence to the prose.  I would have to agree.  The book is like poetry.  Take away those words and you’re left with just imagery; with­out the words, you’re left with tying vir­tu­ally unfath­omable thoughts into a few sec­onds of screen real estate.

Pen­hall and Hill­coat have done, I think, as good a job as could be.  The movie stands on it’s own quite well.  It’s just miss­ing the depth and intro­spec­tion that the novel had.  If there was a way to accu­rately com­mu­ni­cate those details in a film we’d prob­a­bly never see another critic com­plain about unfaith­ful adaptations.

What The Road man­aged to do was take the essence of the book and present it to us suc­cess­fully on the screen.  Much was lost in trans­la­tion but what was pre­sented was true and pow­er­ful and extremely well done.  No other movie about the apoc­a­lypse is quite as mov­ing, truth­ful, or hard to watch as this.

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Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbLgszfXTAY

Inter­est­ing review of the book: http://www.themodernword.com/reviews/mccarthy_road.html