The Road: Bleak and Beautiful

Some time ago, Cormac McCarthy’s post apocalyptic Pulitzer Prize winning novel really affected me (embarrassingly so) on a plane somewhere above Thailand. As I finished reading it on a long haul flight, after crying into my terrible airline food, i knew it was a book I, myself wanted immediately to make into a film.

The Road is definitely a cinematic novel. So vivid is McCarthy’s writing and so brilliantly placed is his dialogue (Read No Country for Old Men as proof; Even dialogue kings, The Coen Brothers dared not mess with it) that even I could see every scene and every shot laid out end on end as a full feature. Sparse, dark, slow and all enveloping.

It would seem, however that Aussie John Hillcoat (Director of the horribly underrated The Proposition and the almost unseen Ghosts… of the Civil Dead) had precisely the same idea and, more than that, the means to do it. Despite its obvious filmic quality it’s a daunting premise to be shifted in to a movie as much of the strength of the novel relied on only two real characters and the author’s unbelievable knack for making a desolate gray landscape so unbelievably readable, consistently for 300 pages.

The worry for me, when thinking about The Road on screen, was that the images, as beautifully harsh as they are, outside of a readers head, just mightn’t be able to hold their intensity the way McCathy’s text does for feature length.

The premise is as bare boned as the starving travellers in it: 10 or so years after an unexplained global catastrophe, The Man (Viggo Mortenson) and The Boy (Kodi Smitt-McPhee) walk a destroyed desolate landscape somewhere in America, heading south for a warmer climate, which may or may not still exist. The road they walk is also inhabited with survivors who also scavenge the land for food and the odd scant human to nibble on. As epic a tale as this sounds the story is immediately compacted when the focus pulls immediately to one framing a story of a father and son.

In Mortenson’s soft but dense voice over and with flashbacks of The Man’s wife and The Boy’s mother (Charlze Theron) adding a varying impact and necessity, the film unfolds, admirably, much like the novel and Hillcoat thankfully doesn’t tamper with the brilliantly minimal dialogue between the characters. Theron does a great job as The Woman with only a few scenes. The Man and The Boy are played with both care and passion by Mortenson and Smitt-McPhee. Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce Lend a hand in small roles but the stars of the film are really the only two that could have been.

As far as a straight adaption goes Hillcoat nails the bleak, powerful atmosphere, it’s design and mood certainly makes The Road a difficult film to enjoy in the truest sense of the word. It has to be said that, while certainly not a feel good film in anyway, and despite some heavy handed scriptwriting in the final moments there is a definite beauty and undeniable weight in the pair’s relationship and the film is undoubtedly a success because of it.

The harshness of the landscape, the films overall pace and the unexplained end of the world scenario will definitely will frustrate some cinema goers (The snoring lady in the front row at the screening I attended would certainly agree) but if you’re looking for a challenging piece of mainstream cinema and don’t mind some difficult ground underfoot you will certainly get something out of Hillcoat’s relentless, tough and bold film. Just make sure you line up a few beers and some good conversation afterward.