Less Traveled

John Hillcoat's The Road detours from the bleak beauty of Cormac McCarthy's source material.

by Sam Adams

ROAD RAGE: Viggo Mortensen (foreground) plays a father, who will try anything to protect his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) in the apocalyptic Road.

[City Paper Grade: B-]

In The Road, there is no middle ground. The Earth has been scoured by an unidentified catastrophe — probably nuclear or environmental in origin, possibly both — and what remains is a barren, denuded landscape covered in ash and grime, a corpse from which all but the faintest glow of life has drained. There are survivors, although not many, and those who remain have largely shed the vestiges of civilization. Some sift through the rubble, looking for cans of food or the occasional bony animal. Others, banded together in groups, hunt what seems to be the most numerous prey left: each other.

The only holdouts against the slide into primitivism are a father and son, played by Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee, fleeing the onset of winter weather and seeking whatever is left of the sea. They, the father tells his son, are "the good guys," and for all they, or we, know, they may be the last decent people on Earth.

There may be no cinematic equivalent to the stark obscurity of Cormac McCarthy's prose, etched in sentences as hard as rock and sometimes as impenetrable. (Some of his vocabulary is so abstruse it turns up only in discussions of his novels.) But in The Proposition, a movie heavily inspired by McCarthy's Blood Meridian, director John Hillcoat showed an affinity for the bleak beauty of the author's novels, although his was a distinctly juicier and more operatic take. The Road, however, offers little opportunity for succulence. The ripe dialogue and quasi-noir action that provided the backbone of the Coens' No Country for Old Men is replaced by functional exchanges and brute endurance, a stolid existence that is its own bitter reward.

Not surprisingly, Joe Penhall's script pounces on the book's scraps of sentimentality: the tender exchanges between man and boy; the flashbacks to the post-cataclysmic days before the man's wife and the boy's mother (Charlize Theron) opted to end her own life rather than continue in a world without hope. It's an understandable, if predictable, decision, given the conventional wisdom that the book was unfilmable and the risk of building a studio production atop a pile of corpses. But it's also precisely, damningly wrong. The novel's flashes of emotion work because of their brevity, like incandescent flashes through a curtain of mist. Fiddling with the balance only results in a tepid mélange, decreasing the intensity without appreciably shifting its tone.

In some ways, The Road ought to work better than it does. The bond between Mortensen and Smit-McPhee is truly affecting, and Mortensen has just the right blend of soulfulness and brawny pragmatism to portray a man who is able to keep himself and his child alive while still holding onto vestiges of a better time. The landscapes, many filmed in post-industrial western Pennsylvania, with visual effects by Philadelphia's DIVE (see "Dive In"), are forbidding and alien, well-shot by Javier Aguirresarobe (who did the same for New Moon). But the movie is too often merely grim when it should be frightening, flatly dour instead of morally anguished. The horrors on display are merely taken in stride, as if they're what we ought to expect given the circumstances.

Hillcoat certainly provides the requisite seriousness, but what the movie lacks is an underlying sense of innocence, a sense that, however far humanity has sunk, there is at least some chance of rising again — and, more importantly, that the exigencies of this new world are no justification for the depths to which some have sunk. At times, father and son meet others on the road, not enemies but not friends, either, and the father treats them with the same hardness he does their genuine foes. His son, who has no memory of better times, opposes him, urging him to share their precious food with strangers, choosing comradeship over survival. The boy's argument may be naïve, but it's also essential, a signpost toward a day when imminent threats do not determine every action. The movie, however, can't see over the horizon, and simply gets lost in the fog.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

The Road | Directed by John Hillcoat, A Weinstein Co. release, Opens Wed., Nov. 25, at Ritz Five