John Hillcoat’s nasty and chilling adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was the best, most powerful film from 2009. Ever since I first viewed it I knew it would be impossible to forget. This is an emotionally riveting experience, a film that’s not likely to be embraced by all viewers, but I found it to be brilliant on pretty much every level. The snubbing that this film received, both by its distributors, and the Academy, was despicable. This is a masterful piece of post-apocalyptic fiction, a film that’s appropriately grim and bleak, but one that contains slivers of hope for humanity even during the darkest of moments. Viggo Mortensen’s quietly devastating performance as The Father was yet another incredible piece of work from this actor, who has strangely been missing from the screen for the last few years it seems. Kodi Smit-McPhee, making his debut performance, held his own quite admirably as Mortensen’s confused and scared son; the two of them hit some dramatic high notes of raw, honest, emotional intensity and their chemistry as father/son was palpable in every scene. Hillcoat (The Proposition, Lawless, the outstanding Triple 9 which is currently in theaters) and screenwriter Joe Penhall (the fantastic and deeply underrated Enduring Love) weaved a furiously dark tale of survival at the end of the world, smartly adapting Cormac McCarthy’s blistering novel, without ever resorting to cheap sentimentality as a buffer between all sorts of disturbing yet thought provoking narrative content.
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s moody score (they also did the brilliant music for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) combined perfectly with the stunningly desolate cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe, and Chris Kennedy’s intricately detailed and decrepit production design truly brought the viewer into this haunting, nightmarish world. I thought about the ending of this movie for days after I first witnessed it, and even after countless viewings, I’m still left shaken up by it. The film ends as it should, but it leaves you wondering so many things, but in a great, enriching way. This is the kind of introspective and sad piece of cinema that not a lot of people want to sit through, and I get that. But for me, films like The Road are why I love the power of the cinematic form. The Road is one of the best and most interesting films to deal with the idea of the apocalypse, and I just wish it had found a larger audience on the big screen and more support from the company that distributed it. When a film is as uncompromising with its vision in the way that The Road was, it becomes a challenge to market the story to a broad audience, hence the terribly misleading action-oriented trailer that pulled a major bait and switch. Whenever I watch The Road, I constantly ask myself how I would react in the situations that unfold during the story. What would I do if confronted with these odds? The Road doesn’t offer easy answers. It’s mysterious but accessible, and the way that Hillcoat and Penhall dispense with clues and signs as to the who/what/where/when/why of the desolation is subtle and eerie. I adore this strong and powerful piece of contemplative work, and it’s one that I’ll re-visit for many years to come.
***SERIOUSLY SPOILER FILLED SIDE-BAR INVOLVING MULTIPLE FILMS – PROCEED WITH CAUTION***
I love to ponder the idea of mixing movie worlds. After the events of David Michod’s astonishing The Rover, Guy Pearce, who would be out of reasons to stick around in the Australian outback, and given that The Rover features only a partial collapse of society, hitches a boat ride to the East Coast of America. He’s not there for more than a few months, when, BANG!, whatever happens to destroy society in The Road happens, and he’s now in a similar situation as he was in The Rover, just in a different part of the world. Viggo and his son traverse the coastline and make it to that beach, where, wouldn’t you know it, Guy Pearce from The Rover shows up, old and sloppy with some other people in tow (a family? Stragglers?), and he adopts Mortensen’s son. Boom. I love this.
Podcasting Them Softly 