The Road Review

Set at an unspecified time in the very near future (there is no sign of any technological or design progress from today), the film plunges us into a stricken landscape of ash, dead trees, abandoned cities and empty highways. Overhead, it’s permanent winter – the sun might as well be dead, we never see it. The earth is dead – nothing is growing, and nothing is living on it, just a few human survivors, scavenging for the last residue of food stuff.

What happened is never spelled out, though the implication is a nuclear catastrophe on a continental, and probably global, scale. At any rate, there’s no power in this cowed new world, no electricity, no water, no warmth save for fire – if you dare risk identifying your position to potentially hostile strangers. (The most plentiful food source at this point is human flesh.)

On the road we find a man (Viggo Mortensen) and a boy, his son (Kodi Smith-McPhee). They travel on foot, coated in rags, pushing a shopping cart that bears a few tins of food, a few tools, some canvas. The Man also has a revolver. He’s down to his last bullets but it’s enough to save his boy if the worst comes. They’re heading south, to the sea, a last hope against hope.

Directed by John Hillcoat, the talented Australian filmmaker who resurrected his career with The Proposition (not the Sandra Bullock movie), and scripted by British playwright Joe Penhall (Blue/Orange), The Road sticks closely to McCarthy’s book. Penhall has invented very little.

Inevitably in concentrating 200 pages into two hours, the movie loses some of the repetition peculiar to the novel’s cadence. It also loses the prose, of course, though Penhall has gleaned almost every scrap of dialogue from the book, including flashbacks to Charlize Theron as the boy’s mother. He also throws in brief snatches of voice over narration. The film is more action-oriented, but the suspense and horror are true to McCarthy’s vision… More than anything, I think, admirers of the novel will be impressed that Hollywood hasn’t diluted it.

There are also vivid images – an empty highway overpass hanging across a desolate valley for example – that reverberate in a completely cinematic way.

Hillcoat understands that the core of the piece is the relationship between the Man and the Boy. (McCarthy, who is 76, says he wrote the book for his young son.) The father desperately wants to impart faith in humanity to his son, but at the same time he’s so desperate to protect him from dangers real and imagined that his own grasp of right and wrong must be suspect. How could it be otherwise when everyone they encounter (they include Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, Garret Dillahunt and Molly Parker) is a potential thief and killer? Viggo Mortensen is absolutely riveting in this role, fiercely practical but frighteningly pale and thin. The child is equally believable. We never doubt how fundamentally each depends on the other.

It’s in these rigorous terms that McCarthy insists this is an optimistic story. Audiences more used to apocalyptic adventure fantasies like 2012, Mad Max, or the imminent Book of Eli may beg to differ. This is a dark, brooding film, full of anguish and horror, utterly without humour or romance. So far it has struggled to make inroads at the US box office, but in this case that is probably a badge of honour. Superbly photographed by Javier Aguirresarobe (Talk to Her) and with a fine, subtle score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, The Road is a tough watch, but you come out knowing you’ve experienced something raw and worthwhile.