The Road
John Hillcoat (2009)
This adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a father and son trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world is often astonishing to look at. The location filming – in Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Oregon (and without reliance on CGI, according to John Hillcoat) – is alarmingly credible. The occasional image looks a little over-composed – there’s a glum shot of lines of telegraph poles stretching into the distance in which the poles in the foreground are leaning and the ones in the background are straight – but the black, leafless trees have a sinister beauty, and are powerfully expressive because they’re both forbidding and vulnerable. (All plant life on Earth is dying and there’s a sequence in which trees crash to the ground. It’s tragic because of the fall of something great, as well as terrifying from the point of view of the father and son in the forest.) Whatever cataclysmic event has occurred to make the planet sick unto death (it’s unexplained) has blotted out the sun. The only brightness in the waste land comes from firelight and from the labels on a cache of tinned food the travellers discover but the cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe defines remarkably graded shades of grey in the drained, muddied landscape and there are haunting long shots of the man and the boy trekking across the horizon against a narrow band of light with dark clouds above them and dark land below. (What Aguirresarobe does with a colourless palette seems all the more brilliant when the last film shot by him that I saw was the languorously sunlit Vicky Cristina Barcelona.) But The Road isn’t so easy to admire beyond these visual accomplishments; it’s hard going not because it’s rigorous or emotionally wrenching but because it’s monotonously solemn. One indication of the blatant self-importance of the story is that the characters don’t have names: the man is in the credits as ‘Man’, the boy as ‘Boy’ and so on.
In some ways, Viggo Mortensen is very well cast as Man. He’s well equipped to play archetypal heroes battling adversity: his handsomeness is both chiselled and rugged; he suggests bodily strength and mental resourcefulness. There are moments too when Mortensen’s facial bone structure enables him – particularly when he’s breathing heavily or asleep with his mouth slightly open to show prominent teeth – to look strikingly like a skeleton-in-waiting. His character’s love for his son is convincing, especially in its physical expression, and Mortensen has a naturally honourable quality which means that he can avoid sanctimony in the role of a man striving, in dehumanizing circumstances, to keep his child and himself alive without sacrificing essential humanity. (To be more specific: this father needs to keep foraging to keep them both alive while sticking to the belief that eating people is wrong. He’s anti-social because he suspects everyone else of being a potential cannibal.) Yet Viggo Mortensen never suggests a man with a life in the pre-apocalyptic world. The very first time we see him – on the day before the world changed irreparably – Man is holding a horse and Mortensen puts his head wistfully against the animal’s head as if he already knew the good life was nearly over. John Hillcoat doesn’t help in the choice of flashbacks to Man’s past life, which seem too consciously memorable: sliding his hand up the long legs of his wife (Woman) as they sit listening to a classical concert, a composed, idealised image of her sunbathing, etc. Mortensen reads the voiceover narrative in a way that suggests exhaustion but with a studied gravity – he uses the same tone even when the man reads a story to the boy.
According to his Wikipedia filmography, Hillcoat has directed a video for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and he overuses the mournful music which Cave and Warren Ellis have written for The Road – sometimes it makes the quietly spoken leading pair all the harder to hear. As the son, Kodi Smit-McPhee does well enough but he’s touching only when he’s inarticulate, whimpering or crying. (Smit-McPhee is an experienced child actor in Australia and his knowingness as a performer isn’t always an advantage here.) In any case, I had a fundamental difficulty with the character of the boy. His mother is heavily pregnant with him when the cataclysm occurs; in another flashback, we see Man delivering the baby (although Woman is horrified at the idea of bringing a child into a moribund world). Boy has never known a world without civilisation and, in recent experience (it’s not made clear how long ago his mother departed the scene), a life other than the gruelling quest for survival that we see him living. In one of the series of deserted houses the pair enter, the father finds a decomposed body in a bed and tells his curious son it’s ‘nothing you’ve not seen before’. Yet the child proves to be far from inured to the harshness of their existence. When his father – always advising the boy to keep an eye out for ‘the bad guys’ – does something harshly pragmatic or, one occasion, vengeful, his son is distressed and disputes these actions. He seems to have developed strong reserves of compassion and altruism thanks not to experience, or even the example of his father, but to a sentimental idea about the innate goodness and innocence of children in the mind of Cormac McCarthy – or at least the mind of Joe Penhall, who did the adaptation.
The boy’s tolerance and resignation are also surprising. He and his father are heading south –‘towards the coast’. Since the man’s voiceover explains right at the start that the whole planet is in terminal decay, I wasn’t clear why the coast represented a certainly beneficial destination but I suppose you can accept that humans would always live in hope to keep themselves going. The boy asks the man if the sea is blue; the father says he doesn’t know. When they make it to the coast, he apologises that the sea isn’t blue but the son registers no disappointment that seaside life is as grim as any other terrain. Their southward journey has been interrupted when they find an underground bunker, well stocked with food and drink and running water. (I liked the way Kodi Smit-McPhee savoured the syllables of ‘shampoo’ – a new word for the boy – when his father washed his hair.) When, one night, they hear noises of a dog overground, the father decides that must mean ‘bad guys’ on the prowl and that they must leave their lair, taking as many provisions as possible with them. The son, reasonably enough, seems astonished: considering that they live all the time on the edge of death, surely they might just as well have taken a chance and stayed put. Not once does the boy, when they’ve resumed their journey and new horrors, say ‘I told you so’.
Charlize Theron does good work as the wife; you sense that, like Mortensen, she is personally committed to the material but she doesn’t let this infuse her acting. Mortified by having giving birth, the wife wanders off one night without food or provisions and so, one assumes, to certain death. Although the scene is hard to credit, it’s very well played by Mortensen and Theron. Robert Duvall has a cameo as a nearly blind old man whom father and son meet at one point. It’s a well-judged performance – Duvall doesn’t overdo the nobility of the man or push his own distinguished-elderly-actor status. The character, uniquely, has a name (Ely) but, as if to compensate for compromising his symbolism, Penhall (via McCarthy?) gives him one of the most unconvincingly epigrammatic lines in the script. When the Mortensen character asks, ‘Do you want to die?’ Duvall replies, ‘No: it’s wrong to expect luxuries in circumstances like this’. As a thief who takes virtually all the possessions of the father and son, Michael Kenneth Williams comes through strongly in an effective, upsetting sequence: Man apprehends the thief, forces him to strip and leaves him to starve or freeze to death. (The child keeps looking back in anguish at the naked man and eventually persuades his father to leave a tin of food and clothing on the track they’re following.) I thought the best performance in the supporting roles came from Guy Pearce as the man (Veteran) who adopts the eventually orphaned boy: in his short time on screen, Pearce not only connects emotionally with Kodi Smit-McPhee; he also economically and strongly suggests a connection with a world that we know.
The propensity of films to seem generic no matter how extraordinary the circumstances of the story they’re telling never fails to impress me. It may not be the case with the novel of The Road but, in the movie, as soon as the father develops a bad cough you know his number is up; when the boy wants to adopt the old man, it feels rather like the standard scene when a child wants to keep a lost animal. The father carries with him a gun, which contains only two bullets. He threatens enemies or suspected enemies with the weapon but the bullets are to be used by him and his son to commit suicide when life becomes intolerable. (In an early scene we see the man show the boy how to shoot himself through the mouth.) I may have lost count but I think that, in the event, both bullets were used in urgent self-defence; anyway, neither turns out to be needed for its originally intended purpose. The father dies and the son finds another father – and a mother and siblings. After an impassioned farewell to his natural father, Boy sees another man (Pearce) approaching. He points the (empty?) gun at him but stops doing so after asking for and getting assurance that the man is one of the ‘good guys’. Boy also asks the man if he has a son; the man says that he does, and a daughter, and he invites Boy to join his family. When he goes to them, he sees they also have a dog. The smiling kindly wife (Molly Parker) says, ‘We’re so glad you joined us. We’ve been following you. We were so worried about you’. This ending is presented as if hopeful and uplifting but it struck me as doubly miserable. Apart from the fact that the world is dying anyway, I took it from what Motherly Woman (sic) said that it was this well-meaning family whose dog Man and Boy had heard above their bunker. Is this supposed to mean that if Man had not been so primed to be distrustful they could have joined forces and died as one big happy family?
9 January 2010