Outside of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist or the latest Saw sequel, there aren’t many films this year that sounded like more of a bummer-fest than a John Hillcoat adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. However, while this post-apocalyptic thriller from the director of The Proposition and the author of No Country for Old Men is indisputably bleak, its brief respites of hope, happiness and humour punctuate the desolate landscape with some exceptionally gratifying sunlight.
The film opens 10 years after a mysterious crisis, the source of which is never explained, leaving America in a state of smoked-out dystopia. Two of the few remaining survivors are the story’s unnamed father and son protagonists, the Man (Viggo Mortensen) and the Boy (11-year-old newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee), who are travelling south while grappling against a variety of adversaries for any semblance of food, shelter or safety. “Cannibalism is the big fear, then the cold. Always the cold,” intones Mortensen in a voiceover, and without providing any spoilers, viewers should brace themselves for several skin-crawling white-knuckle sequences.
With an environment this barren, the people that populate it become the primary focus. Thankfully, the film’s cast turn in top-notch performances, bringing the characters to convincingly half-dead life. Throughout the Man and the Boy’s journey, a palpable transformation begins to take place as their hunger and desperation increases. Battling against their internal wildernesses as much as the one outside, it is the son’s unwavering conviction in the good guys of the world and “keeping the fire” that holds back his father from increasingly ruthless behaviour. Charlize Theron appears in a series of emotionally charged flashbacks as the Man’s wife, while Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce and The Wire’s Michael K. Williams all provide minor but memorable cameos.
Fans of McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel should be satisfied with this onscreen adaptation. Like Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant, post-Katrina New Orleans provided many of The Road’s settings, and in this case, it’s an unfortunately vivid vision of American decay. Following up on their collaboration for The Proposition, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s instrumental score ramps up the intensity several steps further, though it does tip off audience members a tad too quickly in places when scenes are meant to be scary. Nonetheless, that’s about the only nitpicking to be made against this well-crafted worst-case scenario that reminds us to hold our loved ones close.
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