Film

Reviewed at the Venice Film Festival 2009

While waiting for the lights to go down at the first official screening of John Hillcoat’s long awaited screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic Pulitzer Prize winner ‘The Road’ at the 66th Venice Film Festival, I overheard an elderly female critic, obviously unsure as to the nature of the film she was about to view, press a male colleague for some specifics. ‘It’s a romantic comedy starring Cameron Diaz and Matthew McConaughey!’ was his ‘witty’ retort, one that was trailed with a chorus of self-satisfied honking from all who overheard it.

The honking made me realise that there were others attending this screening who cherish the bible black exigencies of Cormac McCarthy’s sensational source novel as much as I do. The film was originally due for a UK cinema release at the beginning of 2009, but was shunted back-and-forth in the schedules and currently resides in a cushy early 2010 spot. I took this potential lack of confidence as a positive sign: maybe Hillcoat had managed to tear the dark, withered heart from the pages and transfer it to the big screen, saddling the distribution company with the feel-bad tearjerker that everyone was secretly hoping for?

Yes and no is the somewhat disappointing conclusion. The story takes place during a time in the near future where Planet Earth has been sizzled to a crisp, leaving only dying trees, petrified houses and marauding bands of gun-toting cannibals foraging on a dismal grey/brown terrain. The reason for this demise is never explained, allowing us to read the film as a document of the fallout from any number of global catastrophes: nuclear warfare, global warming, even intergalactic invasion. But this is the apocalypse as witnessed by man (Viggo Mortensen) and boy (Kodi Smit McPhee), just two of a tiny clutch of survivors who, with a revolver and two shells their only protection, must keep moving and alert to stay alive. They assure us that they’re ‘the good guys’ and that they’re ‘holding the flame’, yet as their depressing misadventures begin to pile up, the notion of what it means to be good becomes ever more strained.

While the film does contain moments of lip-quivering brilliance, they are about as abundant as the filthy morsels of food its world-weary protagonists are able to filch from the inhospitable landscape. The key drawback is that Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall have opted to cram as much of the book onto the screen as possible, and in doing so have stripped every scene back to its molecular framework. It’s like a film of the Guardian Condensed Read version.

Every scene puts forward a single idea, then we move on to the next one. This is sticky, as the entire crux of the central father/son relationship rests on the slow, detailed transference (and subsequent discussion) of skills, techniques and – most importantly – their righteous moral code regarding the stoic nature of self-preservation at any cost. We infuriatingly hop from one scene to the next – often via textbook smoggy vistas with a burnt-out car chassis in the foreground and a smashed up building behind it – with no sense that a blossoming, complex relationship is forming before us. An omnipresent soundtrack of tastefully lilting strings also leaves little room for much-needed ambiguity.

The steam-train velocity of the narrative also affects how the film delivers as a piece of off-shoot genre cinema, another characteristic of McCarthy’s prose that worked wonders. The sense of urgent pragmatism, where every move, no matter how trivial, must be assiduously weighed up by the Man, is gone, as Hillcoat never once leaves his camera to linger on a moment where entering an abandoned house in search of sustenance may not be such a capital idea. Most unforgivable, though, is that the idea of The Road itself – a single remaining putrid artery that lures the sodden dregs of humanity to its trail and represents fate, fortune and, maybe, oblivion – has been entirely removed. There literally is no road in this film. It’s called ‘The Road’, but there is no road, and as such, we’re given little sense of the punishing onward toil of the pair’s journey.

Mortensen is decent (if hardly magnetic) in the plum role of The Man, but again, had he been given a bit more time to flex his acting chops there could have been ample room to pile up the texture. Smit McPhee shows great aptitude and subtlety in his performance as the inquisitive and helplessly kindhearted Boy. Yet some of the best moments occur during those rare instances that involve other people: Robert Duvall is sensational (for all of 3 minutes) as aged wanderer Ely, while Guy Pierce does a nifty bit of show-stealing right in the final reel.

'The Road' isn’t the breezy romcom the critic ironically quipped it would be, but then it isn’t the gruelling, politically ripe survival horror that his gaffawing comrades were pining for either.

It's a tough film, and one worth seeing again, but on this first viewing it just didn't deliver.