IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT.
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The Road

***

Review by Joel Frost

THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

At one point in “The Road”, John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Viggo Mortensen’s voice narrates a section from the book, about trying to dream as a child would and trying to lose oneself in the imaginings of a child’s mind. It’s an understandable exercise and desire, as Viggo’s character is a father who is caught in nothing short of a nightmare; a post-apocalyptic world where he must try to care for himself and his young son in the face of cannibals and a treacherous, dying world. The more complicated and unforgiving the circumstances of a person’s life and environment, the more often a person will attempt to simplify matters and fill in what seems insurmountably awful with hope and indeed, delusion. A lack of full awareness of one’s terrible circumstances and bleak future can be a tool of survival, just as it can be a hindrance. Nobody cares to spend time thinking about the likelihood of being raped and eaten (as well as seeing that done to one’s progeny) and if those things are in fact possibilities, a child’s naivete can prove valuable, at least for one’s sanity.

At another point, the father tells his son that as long as the boy is dreaming of terrible things, that means he is still fighting; once he starts dreaming of good, then he will have given up. It’s a pointed contrast to the earlier rumination, and it helps define the conflict that the father feels at trying to make his son aware of the dangers of their world, while still letting the boy have some freedom to dream and hope of better things. The father knows what faces the two of them, but cannot expect the boy to fully understand it… nor does he want his son to. At the same time, he knows he must instill the boy with a clear understanding of the seriousness of the world’s treachery.

Various flashback scenes show the brief history of the two travelers. The boy was born shortly after an undetermined cataclysm (in the book, it is perhaps less ambiguous). The world has been dying, with little to sustain those people who remain. The father’s wife… the boy’s mother (Charlize Theron, doing her best with a small part) becomes aware that there is little left in the way of hope. She cannot bear to live in a world where she will likely be raped and killed, just as her son may be.

In the book, the wife’s despair is a bleak and powerfully persuasive voice. She is not weak. She has not given up, so much as she has merely understood the reality that she and her men live in. She understands herself as a liability. She knows her husband cannot protect both her and their son — if he can protect anyone at all. She soberly explains the situation to him, and it is the most convincing single argument that Cormac McCarthy makes in his novel: If this woman, this mother, is so deeply aware of the situation that she is driven to suicide, then the world must indeed be as dead as she feels. She determinedly destroys herself “with a flake of obsidian… sharper than steel… the edge an atom thick”.

In the movie, while Charlize Theron does convey a certain resigned quality, there is not the same stark, defiant truth to her decision. Moreover, to demonstrate her death, Hillcoat has her merely walk off into the night. It suggests the filmmaker or the producers of “The Road” thought audiences could not forgive a mother leaving her child, but it is a poor choice. It is their job to convey the character’s feelings and her situation, and they fail in this case. Of course, any great work of literature (as The Road most certainly is) often finds itself at a disadvantage when it is relocated to the movie screen. Cormac McCarthy is a masterful chooser of words. He constructs images in a more complex way than a cinematographer could ever hope to. It’s almost unfair to compare what John Hillcoat and his cinematographer, Javier Aguirresarobe have presented for us: a gray world, with trees that uproot themselves and burn, an earth that groans and quakes. The locations and tactful CGI use help frame the dying landscape that these characters travel in. The dead and dying that the father and son encounter on their way are not typical film zombies, but the groaning, bleeding humans that surely would populate a world like this, should it ever exist. The film is valiantly crafted, and yet it can’t possibly reach the complexity of McCarthy’s vision. McCarthy’s Road makes a reader feel lost; Hillcoat’s Road shows a viewer the way.

Kodi Smit-McPhee plays the young boy with a wide-eyed disbelief, as his father attempts to deflect the world’s harshness. Smit-McPhee is well-cast as an innocent, and it is not hard to believe him as he seems to be able to keep his head fairly clear of the nightmares around him. Viggo Mortensen is excellent as usual, delivering a well-toned performance as a man who cannot hope to accomplish what he wants… the eternal protection of his beloved son, as they “carry the fire” together. The father gives in to his own impending death while giving his son all he can, and somehow keeping the boy from being consumed by fear and hatred. It is clear that these two characters share the same soul, as one exits this terrible world and another just begins in it.

It is that beginning, at the end of the film, that also deserves scrutinization. The tone of the end of McCarthy’s book is much different than the film’s finish. Again, it seems the filmmakers felt it necessary to rescue the viewers from the bleakness of the world that these characters live in. Whether a nuclear bomb or some other equivalent destructive force created this world is not of absolute importance to know, but apparently a nuclear family is what will carry the boy through it. It’s what a child might imagine as salvation… a Mommy who hadn’t copped out. A Daddy with a bigger gun. A couple of brothers and sisters to play with. Heck, even a dog. The boy is left in about as good hands as he possibly could be, and that’s somehow not quite satisfying.

The Road is a great novel, but it is only a good film. Since this site is called The Movie Guys, and not The Book Guys, we’ll have to settle for the latter. There is real suspense, tension, sadness, despair, trauma and hope in this film. But John Hillcoat gave in to the imaginings of a child’s mind, and therefore stopped fighting for something a little scarier, a little more real, a little less innocent. It could have made for a great film.

Directed by: John Hillcoat
Release Date: November 25, 2009
Run Time: 119 Minutes
Country: USA
Rated: R
Distributor: Dimension Films

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