TIFF Review: The Road

The Road

OPENING: 10/16/2009

STUDIO: The Weinstein Company

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
“We are not gonna quit. We are gonna survive this.”

Opening Statement
Based on the dystopic award-winning novel by esteemed American writer Cormac McCarthy, The Road is a faithfully bleak adaptation, offering compelling performances from its two leading actors. It never quite captures the full emotional bludgeoning of the literary experience, but has more than enough potency to knock audiences out in their seats. Bring tissues.

Facts of the Case
The world is dead, destroyed. All the plants and animals have died. The sky is gray, and grows more dark and cold with every passing day. A father and son slowly trek across the land. They push a shopping cart filled with what little posessions they have in the world: a few canned goods, a gun with two bullets, some torn blankets.

They are heading for the coast, because that is all they can do to survive. The landscape is torn, full of ruthless gangs and cannibals. They hide in ditches, shiver in forests and fight illness, scraping what little they can from the land as they travel. The boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) has never known a normal life, and the man (Viggo Mortensen) struggles to forget his. Together, they are all they have in the whole world.

The Evidence
The Road is a film that starts bad and gets progressively worse, which in most situations would be harsh criticism. Here, it is by grim design. Set amidst a brutal post-apocalyptic backdrop, the emotional impact of The Road lies between the simple love of a father and his son, of the father trying to protect his boy and raise him right in a chaotic world. The novel is terse, blunt and uncompromising, full of agony and heartache, and the cinematic adaption follows suit. Translating a book to film is always tricky business, but The Road gets most of it right, adhering rigidly to the source material, even copying entire sequences verbatim from the novel. The end result is a composition of silence, of grimaces and groans, of endless walking through a perpetually gray landscape.

The Road sets its scenario in the most abjectly cruel environment possible, a devastated world with no plant or animal life. We assume nuclear fallout, but it is never directly referenced or explained, nor is it required to be. All that matters is the boy and his father, surviving. Roving gangs, cannibalism, starvation, desperation, isolation; none of it matters, because they are together. The pair are headed to the eastern coast, because they might find solace there. They have no way of knowing, but it is a goal, and they stick to it despite all odds. As long as they remain together, they will be okay, even though their gun only has two bullets in it—one for each of them, if it comes to that.

Mortensen and his young co-star, Kodi Smit-McPhee delivers intimate and impressive performances. Despite the sweeping destruction and devastation that surrounds them, one of them is always on-camera; they are the entire universe in the film, disheveled in filthy clothes and crouched together in the cold. As hunger sets in, they grow pallid and wraithlike, both actors obviously losing quite a bit of weight for the part. Some cameo appearances are interjected here and there, but these are superfluous: Guy Pierce and Robert Duvall make short appearances, and we see Charlize Theron in flashback as the mother and wife, but these are secondary to the plot at best. The film is an exercise in isolation between the man and the boy, and all other sequences are but brief respites.

For such a solemn film, The Road is surprisingly hard to articulate discussion on. It is a film that will either connect with audiences, or fail to entirely. Judge it on the merits of its surface, and critics may find it dull and abhorrent, unnecessarily plodding and uneventful, and endlessly drawn out. It is all of these things, but explaining why they work in the film’s favor is challenging. This is a desperate film, one that pleads with every fiber of its being for hope that never comes. There is no salvation, no happy ending, no resolution—the world is lost, dead, destroyed and mangled beyond recognition. There is only the man and the boy, and whatever semblance of a normal life they can scrape up. With a growing sense of desperation, the man tries vainly to harden the boy, to teach him about the world he must now live in. The boy struggles and digs his heels in, refusing to abide by his father’s proclamations, wanting to experience his life his own way, damning the consequences. It is all allegorical, of course; The Boy and The Man, with no given names should give testament to this fact. Perhaps those of us who struggled in their relationships with their fathers (or likewise, fathers with their sons) will find greater meaning in the tale.

And yet, something is amiss. The adaptation, while faithful, lacks the emotional resonance we expect from McCarthy’s brutal and uncompromising tale, rarely capturing the true emotional desperation of the novel. The Road is a very good movie; a sad and taxing movie that asks much of its audience to endure, but is naught but pale simulacra compared to the novel. The movie is emulation, not adaptation, and anyone who hasn’t read the novel owes it to themselves to seek it out and experience it first-hand. Certainly, there is enough potency in The Road to deliver success to the film with critics and fans alike, but one cannot help but hope for something extraordinary here, something transcendental. Maybe the Coen Brothers set unrealistic expectations in this area.

Director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) has crafted an impressive cinematic vision full of ash and burned forests, earthquakes and endless skies of gray. Ominous shooting locations and some CGI tweaks create a wholly believable and despondent world with two lone inhabitants, wandering endlessly, with nary a soul in sight, elegant in its austere and torched beauty. The film’s biggest misstep is the score, flowery and flowing, far too melodramatic and active for such a bleak production, always trying to eke out that extra tear with the crescendo of strings during the sad moments. It is pure sappy overkill.

Closing Statement
At the festival screening, actor Viggo Mortensen wryly stated to the audience that we should not view The Road as “heart-breaking”, but rather, a “heart-opening” film. There is wisdom in this statement, a strange ethereal beauty to be found in this road tale of despair and damnation; an idyllic American stubbornness to keep on pushing despite overwhelming odds, holding onto the ties that bind us at all costs.

Even though The Road fails to capture the full emotional spectrum of the novel, it ends up a moot point. The elements that it gets right—the celebration of the protective bond between father and son, the desire to protect one another against all odds in a world gone to hell—it gets perfectly, absolutely, brilliantly right.

Seriously, bring tissues.

The Verdict
8/10

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