Sunlight through green leaves. Yellow blossoms rustling by the side of a house. Vivid pink petals. John Hillcoat’s The Road begins on a poetic note with a triptych of colourful, static images like floral portraiture in veneration of the beauty of nature.
Then our protagonist wakes up.
Gone are the flowers. The apocalypse has come; it arrived in “a shear of light and a series of low concussions,” annihilating humans, animals, and plants alike. The few survivors were left to grope through a bleak, monochrome landscape, blanketed by a recurrent, pneumonia-inducing haze evocative of the destruction of Pompeii and its utter finality.
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The Road
Directed by John Hillcoat Starring Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce |
Dressed in grubby, layered parkas like vagabonds, starving in the total absence of any traditional sources of sustenance, the unnamed father (Viggo Mortensen) and his son (newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee) are travelling south to escape the lethal northern winters.
The film’s iconography almost seems appropriated from The Grapes of Wrath: a desaturated visual aesthetic of 9/11-like shy permeation; the vagrancy and perpetual borderline starvation of the protagonists; and the underlying migration story, which motivates the title as well as the narrative. The sheer griminess of the landscape, the atmosphere, and even the people is refreshingly (if unpleasantly) authentic to the extent that it is almost incomparable to anything outside Terry Gilliam’s oeuvre.
But The Road, based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name, quickly takes a departure from normalcy into a Bizarro World parody of Steinbeck’s story as father and son encounter other members of the far-flung remnants of humanity, now reduced mostly to thieves, murderers, rapists, and cannibals.
The man’s wife (Charlize Theron) foretold these horrors and took her own life, believing mere “survival” would be worthless in a world where ugliness, danger, and deprivation substituted for beauty, security, and happiness.
Like José Saramago’s Blindness and its respective film adaptation, The Road is interested in exploring what happens to humanity in the face of hopelessness and desperation. Characterized by the same frank but never gratuitous brutality manifest in No Country For Old Men, this post-apocalyptic survival story is often difficult, occasionally disturbing, but always riveting.
While there are a few hide-your-eyes moments, nothing is shown for the sake of the showing: there is gore on display, but director Hillcoat wisely eschews gratuitousness, proving for once and for all that restraint (matched here by a mild and unpretentious musical score) lives on in Hollywood amongst the near-monthly instalments of torture porn.
Since his mainstream debut in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Mortensen has consistently impressed with his performances, earning accolades for roles in A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. Here he is at his absolute peak, encompassing the concealed but explosive formidability of his Promises mafioso as well as the duty-bound grimness of his History dad, but balancing these with an overwhelming paternal love nowhere to be found in either of those films.
The supporting includes Robert Duvall and the always-engaging Guy Pearce.
But the real surprise is that, if anything, they are all outdone by 13-year-old Smit-McPhee, who offers an impossibly sincere performance as the son both unready and unwilling to face the prospect of his father’s eventual death even as Mortensen’s character attempts to groom him into an independent survivor who will persevere when he is one day left alone.
For its sporadic inclusion of brand-name products, The Road will inevitably face criticism from the same Adbusters types who got mad about Spider-Man landing ever so briefly on a beer company’s eighteen-wheeler in one of that trilogy’s web-slinging scenes. But this is verisimilitude, not product placement; it is precisely the utter banality – to us – of a Coke can or a Cheetos package, over which our protagonists become almost tragically excited, which makes these moments resonant.
To put it simply, The Road is the best movie 2009 has offered up so far. Perhaps the ultimate embodiment of the maxim that the journey is more important than the destination, this spell-binding story feels destined for recognition at the 82nd Academy Awards.