Hillcoat’s Road Can’t Match McCarthy’s Novel
They must keep heading south.
Kodi Smit-McPhee and Viggo Mortensen in Dimension Films' The Road
The world is at an end, a continuous blanket of ash slowly transforming everything within it to dust. Amidst this barren backdrop a driven father (Viggo Mortensen) does what he can to care for his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) taking to the road in an attempt to get to the coast before winter descends upon them. It is a constant fight for survival, small groups of cannibals possibly hiding around every corner while other dangers both real and imagined continually dog their every move.
With only two bullets left in their gun, their shoes wearing thin and food supplies dwindling hope, like the world around, appears to be lost. But the father knows they must keep heading south. No matter what happens, if safety is a possibility, if hope truly isn’t lost, than that’s the direction they must go if they are going to find it.
Based on Cormac McCarthy’s magnificently devastating novel, director John Hillcoat’s (The Proposition) The Road is a meticulous and thoughtful adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winner that packs a fairly visceral punch. It is a bleak descent into the end of days, a visually stunning travelogue of nature and humanity run amok a viewer almost can’t help but respect.
Be that as it may, for those who have read the source material I can’t say the movie plays near as well as they would like it to. Not because it gets anything wrong, if anything Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall Enduring Love) do a pretty great job taking the material from the page to the screen, but more because what worked in prose doesn’t quite have the same sort of impact when photographed for the cinema. There is something about McCarthy’s staccato-like writing that packs a major wallop, and as good a job as the filmmakers do adapting it there is a distancing quality to the movie that sadly kept me at arm’s length.
It’s hard for me to describe exactly what I mean by saying that. The acting is universally excellent, Mortensen, Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, Robert DuVall and Guy Pearce giving themselves over fully to their characters and to the world in which they inhabit. The film is stunningly designed Chris Kennedy (The Proposition) while Margot Wilson’s (The Thin Red Line) costumes matched my own imaginary versions I came up with while reading the book just about perfectly. Finally, Nick Cave’s (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) minimalist score hits right to the very soul, the movie achieving much of its power to startle and amaze directly because of it.
At the same time, as great as all of this sounds in theory in reality none of it affected me the way I felt I wanted it to. My heart never leapt from chest, my breath never got trapped somewhere in the back of my throat. Although the world is in a constant state of melancholic devastation I never felt personally devastated by it myself. Sure there are moments of shock and awe (a trip to a secluded farmhouse comes staggeringly close to achieving the same sense of ghastly dread McCarthy managed) but overall I didn’t feel there were enough of them to make this countryside journey worthwhile. It almost feels like it was being bleak just for the sake of being bleak, Hillcoat and Penhall never tapping into the same heartrending humanistic failings the author managed with such subtly sparse dexterity in the book.
All of which makes me very sad. The Road is so well done on so many different levels it pains me a little bit to have to admit to not really caring for it. While it is apparent that Hillcoat and company spent every last ounce of effort to bring this movie to life, and while I was continually impressed by both the actors and by the technicians manufacturing the world for them to live in, the movie just didn’t do it for me. Ultimately I think this is just one of those instances where nothing put upon the screen can compare to the original written word that inspired it, McCarthy’s source material a masterpiece that’s quite possibly impossible to adapt.
Film Rating: êê1/2 (out of 4)
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