The Road (MA), 111 minutes. Director: John Hillcoat. Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee
Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road is a bleak, beautiful meditation on human existence. Set in a wasted, post-apocalyptic United States, it is horrific — almost a horror novel, though certainly also very 'literary'. McCarthy's icy poetic language makes a bittersweet song of his protagonists' (a Man and his son) helpless, distantly hopeful ramble south.
Australian director John Hillcoat catches both beauty and bleakness in his faithful film adaptation. The haggard grey face of the landscape is reflected in the bristling, decrepit debris of the Man's features, where hope and love dwell against all reason. The problem with the film The Road is that it does not succeed in getting far beyond the surface strata.
This difficulty lies in the shift from book to film. Much of the beauty in the novel hums in the sentence gaps of the Man's internal monologue. It's not just the language, or the vivid evocation of a desolated civilisation and encroaching, deadened wilderness. It's the evidence of the depth of the love and the fear that the Man has for the Boy. And how love and fear morph into something close to awe for his son, the one good thing still blooming amid the waste.
Inhabiting a visual medium, and with sparse dialogue at their disposal, Viggo Mortensen (as the Man) and Kodi Smit-McPhee (the Boy) provide authentic performances that are nonetheless inscrutable. Relieved of depth, the characters' pilgrimage, a quest of mythic proportions in the novel, is reduced to a mere dramatic thriller on film; compelling, but cold.
Hillcoat has previously provided cinematic reflections on the violence in humanity, in Ghosts ... of the Civil Dead (1988) and The Proposition (2005). In The Road he handles the horror elements well, recognising that effective horror lies not in visceral shock and gore but in gripping the deepest fears and discomforts of the human heart.
The film's most intense scene, therefore, comes not upon the discovery of a human abattoir in the basement of a seemingly abandoned house, but moments later, when the house's cannibalistic owners unexpectedly return (cannibalism is rife in this desperate world). For tortuous seconds the Man, not wanting the Boy to meet a profane end at the murderers' hands, believes the time has come for them to carry out the ritual double suicide they have rehearsed for just such evil circumstances. Here