Film review: The Road

Published on Thursday 7 January 2010 18:19

THE ROAD (15) *** DIRECTED BY: JOHN HILLCOAT STARRING: VIGGO MORTENSEN

NOTHING dates like the future, which may be why most post-apocalypse movies favour the same regressive hardscrabble look. Scorched-earth landscapes, haunted protagonists and vagrant chic fashion stylings have ensured this fixture of horror and sci-fi cinema has acquired its own non-date-specific aesthetic, one that is almost as universally identifiable and malleable as the Western.

The Road is no different. It may have been adapted from Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2006 novel, but its literary pedigree doesn't provide director John Hillcoat with radical new landscapes in which to ponder its "what makes us human" themes. Instead, it gives him plenty of opportunity to translate the book's spare and despairing lyricism into a bleak cinematic language that flirts with the pulpier aspects of genre fiction while trying to transcend them on an emotional and philosophical level.

That this long-delayed film (it should have been in cinemas last year) never quite succeeds in this respect hints at a loss of nerve on either Hillcoat's part, or more likely, his backers, resulting in a film that manages a few moments of greatness, but in the end seems almost too tasteful and unable – or unwilling – to keep the momentum going for long enough to capture the hard-hitting, full-scale horror implied by its premise.

That premise, fable-like in simplicity and biblical in scale, revolves around a father and his young son trying to survive in a world destroyed by an unspecified catastrophe that has left the land barren, the sky desolate and the remaining survivors starving and on the brink of savagery.

With many others having already crossed over into cannibalism, this Man and Boy (they have no names) are the self-styled good guys, with the Man – who is wary and mistrustful of everyone – desperately trying to hold on to his humanity for the sake of the born-after-the-fact Boy. Respectively played by Viggo Mortensen and newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee, they're a suitably ravaged looking pair, with Mortensen's scrawny, straggly features and soulful eyes capturing the air of a man tormented by fast-fading memories of another life, and Smit-McPhee's angel with a dirty face a constant beacon of hope in a world in that has precious little left.

Trudging ever southward in their filthy clothes, a shopping cart full of supplies in tow, they live in perpetual fear of the marauding bands of hillbillies who no longer think twice about chomping down on human flesh to stay alive. Bands of human hunters roam the countryside, and once idyllic farmhouses are just as likely to have human cattle imprisoned in them, helplessly awaiting slaughter, as they are stores of long-since spoiled food. It's a landscape that frequently recalls the iconography of a zombie apocalypse and the gore overload of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, except that exploitation thrills have been eliminated by the grim reality underscoring such scenes: in The Road, we're constantly asked to remember that these horrors have arisen out of a fundamental survival instinct; they're not there to entertain us.

That doesn't automatically make The Road a more valid cinematic experience. If anything, its high-minded, this-is-good-for-you equation of bleakness with brilliance works against it a little, serving up many of the same allegorical ideas as a George Romero film, a Mad Max movie or even this week's apocalyptic vampire flick Daybreakers, only without the attendant genre thrills that sometimes make these films such a blast to watch. Indeed, the main problem with The Road is that it's not artistically daring enough to make the absence of such things seem irrelevant. A purple-prose-laden voiceover, for instance, smacks of a last-minute loss of confidence in our ability to work out what's going on.

Like the similarly clunky narrative track needlessly added to the original cut of Blade Runner, it is brutal to the ear and insulting to our intelligence, explicating thoughts, feelings and themes that don't need elaboration – Mortensen's haunted features tells us everything we need to know about the devastation that has been wrought on the world. To this end, flashback scenes featuring Charlize Theron as Mortensen's wife seem a tad unnecessary too. Even though these scenes are admirably unsentimental, their inclusion once again over-explains things that would have been more powerful had they been inferred.

What's more, they interrupt the flow of the film. This is a story about the world succumbing to the forces of entropy and entering its whimpering final death phase, and it should be sucking us under with it not providing frequent respite from these horrors.

To be fair to Hillcoat – who made the magnificent, fly-infested Australian western The Proposition a few years ago – he does get a lot right with the film. The ash-scarred landscape – captured on location in parts of Oregon, Pennsylvania and post-Katrina New Orleans (and augmented with unobtrusive CGI) – provides a suitably austere backdrop for some deeply felt performances. He also has fleeting moments of magnificence, such as the scene in which the Boy experiences the unexpectedly pleasurable sensation of a fizzy drink for the first time, a scene that brings to the fore in simple, unfussy fashion the full force of the film's heartbreaking and tragic scenario by giving this kid an all-too-brief taste of a world that will never again exist.

Alas, such things are not quite enough to overcome the compromises evident elsewhere in the film, particularly the ending, which seems overly sentimental, less a reaffirmation of the inherent goodness of humanity than an way to make this bitter pill easier to swallow.