The Road on Film: Beautiful, Bleak

It’s usually fairly easy for a movie critic to drum up a date for a screening. But persuading someone to join you at the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s solemn, searing postapocalyptic novel The Road is apparently akin to asking if they’ll help you transport nuclear waste. One friend essentially declared that even if Pauline Kael rose forth from the grave to endorse this cinematic spectacle of father and son wandering a ruined world in search of uncertain sanctuary, she still would not see it.

(Read “The Director Who Confronted – and Survived – ‘The Road'”)

So as Viggo Mortensen’s dirty, hairy (but still pretty) face rose up from the ashy grave of America, bringing McCarthy’s “Man” to life in John Hillcoat’s bleakly beautiful movie, I was torn between feeling sorry for my unaccompanied self and feeling sorry for the filmmakers. I read McCarthy’s lean, brutalizing novel in one unhappy gulp 15 months ago and only recently began to consider myself healed. How do you lure people to a movie made from a book that itself probably should have borne a mental-health warning from the surgeon general? Do you target the innocents or the masochists?

The fact that the movie was originally slated for release last autumn and bounced around this fall’s schedule before landing in Thanksgiving week suggests that the questions stumped the marketing professionals as well. But if Hillcoat–best known for his Australian outlaw tale The Proposition–and screenwriter Joe Penhall felt any pressure to temper the novel’s agonies, they shrugged it off. Their Road is respectful of McCarthy’s glumness, and they have made no effort to soften the despair.

The Man and his son, the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a child of perhaps 11, raised in a postcivilized era in which a lone can of Coca-Cola is a treasure, encounter no miraculously budding tree in the wasted landscape, no fish jumping from a dead ocean. The best they get is a rheumy-eyed old man (the great Robert Duvall) who considers death a luxury. Bands of cannibals rule the land, favoring children as meals. It’s hopeless except for, as in McCarthy’s book, the driving force of the narrative: a father’s fierce devotion to his child. “The child is the warrant,” Mortensen tells us in voice-over, the only reason for being.

Hillcoat does make one important addition to the story: flashbacks to what life was like when the Woman (Charlize Theron) was still alive. They weren’t good times–the world was well on the way to environmental ruin–but at least the Man still had a partner. Theron’s presence may be a nod to producers who wanted a female star in the picture, but it’s not entirely successful in terms of adhering to McCarthy’s intent. Theron is graceful as always, but meeting the Woman only makes her absence more troubling and alters our relationship with the Man for the worse.

For instance, when the Man tosses his last picture of the Woman into a gully, a gesture meant to banish dangerous sentimentality and show his commitment to inhabiting the new world, it seems cruel and pointless: cruel because the Boy is entitled to an image of his mother, pointless because every time the Man looks at the Boy’s face, he must see her reflection–Smit-McPhee looks so uncannily like Theron that it’s impossible to forget her. (The Boy also wears her cast-off hat for virtually the whole movie, playing up the resemblance.)

The book engages with moral arguments about protection and survival: What if everything we believed in vanished, leaving love to stand naked on its own–would that be enough? McCarthy’s writing has always been a manly affair, so it made sense that he reduced his world to father and son, with the Man emerging heroic. Here, when the Man speaks of carrying “the fire,” i.e., the conviction of humanity, it rings more hollow, even though Mortensen grapples well with the potential corniness of that line (he gives a somber, deeply affecting performance). The wasteland that surrounds them–the sun’s fire extinguished, the forests burning–makes forcing someone you love to endure it seem like a selfish act. “I don’t want to just survive,” the Woman tells the Man, and The Road creates such a seamless vision of misery that it persuades you she was right. See it if you have the strength, but if your friends turn you down, arm yourself with a stiff drink on the way in; fortification is needed.