The Road (2009)
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009a review by Jeffrey Overstreet*
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Dimension Films presents a film directed by John Hillcoat.
Written by Joe Penhall, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy.
Starring Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce
Running time: 119 minutes.
Rated R.
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The Road isn’t like any holiday-season movie you’ve seen before.
As the movie begins, a character called the Man rises early and goes to the window. By the look of dawning horror on his face it’s clear: something has gone very wrong in the world.
He turns on the bathwater. His wife walks in and asks, “Why are you taking a bath?” “I’m not,” he replies.
Already the Man is thinking of survival. To persevere in this disintegrating world, they’ll need water, food, and each other. Before long, all he has is his son. And as the Man and the Boy try to avoid natural disasters, thieves, murderers, and cannibals, their conversations along the road demonstrate the tension between the demands of survival and the pleas of the conscience.
What happened to the world? The film doesn’t tell us.
And thank goodness. If we were subjected to a special-effects sequence of a meteor plummeting to the earth, or lectured about the consequences of global warming, or half-blinded by a mushroom-cloud fireworks show, The Road would immediately be trivialized into an “Issues Film.” Reviewers would end up discussing the filmmakers’ political agenda, and the greater opportunities for exploring a work of art would very likely be lost.
This is all we get: The Man says, “The clock stopped at 1:17. There was a long sheer bright light and a series of low concussions. . . . It is cold and growing colder and the world slowly dies.”
As the neighborhood turns dangerous, the Man’s despairing wife states with certainty that savages will soon rape her, rape their son, kill them all, and eat them.
No, The Road isn’t your typical holiday movie. But it’s likely to draw quite a crowd anyway. The tone, the words, and the circumstances will be familiar to millions who read Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer-prize-winning, Oprah-blessed novel. It’s a book that got people talking.
What will moviegoers discuss as they leave the theater? The conversation has already begun, but alas, it is already stuck in predictable ruts. People are arguing about
- its box-office and award potential,
- how it makes people feel, and
- whether or not the filmmakers have done a good job in translating McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic vision.
These are important matters, but alas, the conversation usually stops there. It employs only a few of what the detective Hercule Poirot loved to call “the little gray cells.”
We can do better than that.
Getting Past “How Does It Feel?”
How does The Road make you feel?
Well, it’s certainly not “the feel-good movie of the holiday season.” Nor is it an apocalyptic amusement-park ride like 2012. No, it’s a vision of a very plausible End of the World, so I suspect you’ll find it to be frightening, bleak, and shocking in its depictions of human cruelty.
Feelings are an important part of the cinematic experience. But a movie should not be judged solely by the emotions it inspires. Sometimes, films that are immediately pleasing prove to be sentimental and forgettable, offering shallow platitudes and frivolous titillation. Sometimes, films that are frightening, depressing, heartbreaking—even boring—haunt us later with powerful questions, awaken the voice of conscience, move us to reflection, wisdom, and even compassion.
A movie can exercise a viewer’s mind and conscience if he studies its artistry. He might discuss the questions it explores (if it explores questions at all); the poetry of its screenplay (if there is any); and the composition of its images (if the filmmaker really composed them).
And that’s only the beginning.
Is there anything in The Road worthy of study and discussion after the credits roll? Is there anything nourishing, anything that will keep our minds working in ways that will influence our lives for better or worse? I would argue that The Road is full of “educational moments” and even inspiration. But but a lot of that depends on you.
The Road provoked powerful emotions in this moviegoer. Director John Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall paraphrased McCarthy’s vision into an experience that, while frightening and burdensome, can also be useful and—dare I say redemptive?
The Road troubles us with the reminder that civilization as we know it is fragile, and we might all someday be refugees, scavengers, survivors of a cataclysm. But neither McCarthy nor Hillcoat stop there. They mean to kindle questions about our faith, family, mercy, the gift of children, and each person’s responsibility to “carry the fire” of hope.
And that makes all the difference.
Is It As Good As the Novel?
No, the movie does not—and could not—duplicate the experience of reading McCarthy’s book. Cormac McCarthy’s poetic prose challenges me to fill in the canvas with details of my own presumption. As his dialogue runs almost unadorned, I’m left to imagine inflections, gestures, expressions. This invitation to participate gives each reader a unique experience.
A movie is an entirely different experience. It’s an interpretation. It’s an immersive experience of sight and sound, transporting us into a world of sensual specificity. And thus, it tends to require much less of our imaginations. The sensations wash over us, and often that’s the end of it.
So, in order to “make something of it,” we should discuss what we’ve seen.
Let’s start with the cast.
If we had to choose a popular actor for the leading role, you’d have a hard time finding a better candidate than Viggo Mortensen. He gives it everything he’s got here, and it works. The Man is haggard, hollowed out by harrowing experiences.
But the problem with casting a celebrity is that we bring associations along with us, and those only distract us, influencing what we think about that character. Mortensen brings along the associations of The Lord of the Rings‘ Aragorn—the noble hero. He also brings associations from The History of Violence and Eastern Promises, about men who make terrible compromises, crippling their consciences. You may find these associations distracting, you may not. I suspect that casting a talented unknown would have made this feel more immediate and convincing, less like a “movie.”
The boy, played by newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee, makes a stronger impression. He’s persuasive in his outbursts of moral outrage when his father is tempted to unethical compromise; his fear makes terrifying scenes that much more chilling; and sometimes he seems truly traumatized by what’s happening. Perhaps the most effective aspect of Smit-McPhee’s presence is his familial similarity to the character’s mother, played by the angelic Charlize Theron. The boy has large eyes in a face as pale and round as the moon. His expression is a troubled pool in which we catch distorted reflections of horrors that Hillcoat has mercifully spared us.
Accompanied by a moody (but unnecessary) soundtrack by Nick Cave, the Man and the Boy move through a landscape drawn right from McCarthy’s prose—a world in which “each day is greyer than the one before.” These scenes are sewn together from location shoots around Mt. St. Helens, New Orleans right after Hurricane Katrina, and Pennsylvania. The aesthetics are so dispiriting that you’ll be grateful the story has been abridged so severely; two hours of this is enough for anybody.
And yet, this brings us to the film’s greatest weakness. On the page, words carry information but they also carry implications and suggestions that are the stuff of poetry. In cinema, composition can achieve similar provocation. If The Road had been filmed by Terrence Malick or Hou Hsiao-hsien or any of the big screen’s great poets, it might have been a much richer, more thought-provoking experience.
Instead, the imagery is fairly literal. When Hillcoat and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe (who filmed Vicky Cristina Barcelona and the Twilight saga movies) do discover a striking image—an abandoned semi-truck on a freeway ramp; or the colorful Edenic details in the Man’s pre-apocalypse flashbacks—they seem surprisingly lacking in curiosity, impatient to move us from one incident to the next.
This lack of visual curiosity diminishes the film into something suspense-driven, and not nearly as meditative as it might have been (and I would say—should have been).
Still, it’s a credit to McCarthy, and to Hillcoat and Penhall in their faithfulness to the original vision, that the movie works as well as it does.
“Carry the Fire”
We are sure to hear the same complaints about this film as we did about its super-sized uncle Children of Men a few years ago. “It’s depressing.” “Why would I want to watch that?” “What’s the point of such bleak, dark stuff?”
But that’s the thing: This isn’t some outrageous fantasy. Right this moment, people are living like this. The image of the Man in his puffy ski coat, pushing a grocery cart full of necessities, and his boy walking along in total dependence, is a familiar sight here in Seattle. It’s probably familiar to people just about anywhere on the planet. Neighbors and family members face grim realities like these every day. Loneliness. Poverty. Malnourishment. Terror. Cold. Cruelty. Rape and slaughter.
Films like The Road—and its superior predecessor, Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf—can prompt us to examine our faith, to question how it would hold up during such suffering. It can cause us to consider how the world looks and feels to the poor and the persecuted that we might know compassion. What is more, the sight of a world sinking into darkness drives us to cherish glimpses of human tenderness, freedom, and beauty.
Robert Duvall, almost unrecognizable under layers of grime, turns in one of his most arresting performances as an old man on the road who raises the question of God’s goodness in the darkness. Is there a God, and does he care? Why do we turn to God for help when we do so little to act as the hands of God to our families, neighbors, and enemies? Looking around, he doesn’t see much true humanity.
Do you?
The Road prompts us to treat each other with generosity and kindness and to savor “small graces.” Even a can of Coca-Cola becomes an occasion for kindness. We are reminded, again and again, that if we “carry the fire” we bring hope to a dark world.
Can we hope to carry the light and heat of grace when survival demands that we carry a loaded gun?
That is the question.
Haunting Moments
What images from the movie or the book stick with you?
Reflecting on the film, the moment that burns most vividly in my memory is one that McCarthy never described: The moment of the boy’s birth, the father trying to comfort his wife and help the boy arrive safely, and the mother, bent over in agony, crying out. Looking at her face, I saw the face of all creation, groaning in fear and pain, longing for deliverance and peace.
The Man and Woman’s decision—to bring the Boy into what’s left of this world—is an act of courage and faith, faith that the Woman loses and the Man sustains. Every day in America, men and women dispose of the children they have conceived. They lose faith and hope. They’re afraid. They give the world one less child, one less reminder of beauty and wonder and potential. For all of its darkness, The Road affirms that the best thing to do is to remember that a child is a blessing to us and to the world, just as we remember every Christmas. In that story, a child is born into a cruel and terrifying environment, and he’s given to frightened, inexperienced parents who raise him the best they can.
We could start our discussion there.
Or elsewhere. What images and scenes spoke to you?
Let’s talk it over. That is one of the ways in which we fulfill what human beings were designed to become. That is how we “carry the fire.”
What do you know… maybe The Road is a Christmas movie after all.
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*Some of the material in this article was previously published as “The Road: A Harrowing Journey, but Meaningful” at TheHighCalling.org, and is reprinted with permission.”
