The Road starts out with a lot to prove. It's adapted by director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) and playwright Joe Penhall from Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 book, an Oprah Book Club selection and the 10th novel in McCarthy’s 35-year career of painting prose poems about Men and the Things They Do.
Those who love McCarthy’s stoic language of solitary self-reliance will be waiting for the film version to fail. Those who don’t care for McCarthy’s unrelentingly sparse style or the unblinking cruelty and violence he subjects his characters to are probably going to have no interest in seeing Viggo Mortensen and young newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee act them out. On top of that, The Road is going to be somewhat unfairly held to higher expectations now that the Coen Brothers have cracked the McCarthy novel-to-film code with the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men.
Then of course there is that subject matter. Due to a purposefully unnamed, unexplained cataclysm, civilization has if not been ended then at least been knocked pretty far back on its heels.
What's left is a landscape of ash and decay, cities in dust, most people and animals gone, roadways roamed by gangs looking for whatever food they can find, even from—especially from—previously taboo sources. This is not the whoopee disaster porn of 2012 or the tough-guy excitement of post-apocalyptic action flicks. TV ads for The Road have tried to gin up two mostly false impressions: that the film is full of gut-twisting threats smoothed over in the end via an Up With People triumph of the human spirit.
Yes there is danger on The Road, coming at the Man and Boy (as they are known) from a variety of stomach-churning angles. And yes, as the Man repeatedly tells the Boy, there is a flame of hope still flickering, they are “carrying the fire” of not just civilization, but human goodness. But much of Hillcoat’s film, like McCarthy’s novel, is concerned with slowly pulling you down into this foggy gray world of grueling monotonous survival. The film isn’t running to show you the way to a happy ending, it’s asking you to trudge along that road with the worn-down pair, to share their constant fear, their struggle to find a reason why living and moving along, is preferable to not doing either.
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