The Road – American Horror DVD Release

Sep 4, 2010
Hari Navarro

The Road, Movie – 2010 - Non-free media use rationale for The Road (film)

Director John Hillcoat's road movie through post-apocalyptic America is closely based on Cormac McCarthy's best-selling novel of the same name.

The Road offers up an intriguing example of just how difficult the logistics of transferring material from page to screen can truly be. The beauty of the original book stemmed from the fact that it had the luxury of length. It had the space to engage the reader; wrap them in rags and drag them through the living worlds final death throes. Alternatively the film version decides to hit all the same notes as the book but in doing so, trapped within its 108 minutes, creates a more episodic ride. One that still manages to chill but one that ultimately struggles to leave the same degree of ash in our mouths.

The Road

The Man: ‘The clocks stopped at one seventeen one morning. There was a long shear of bright light, then a series of low concussions. Within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road. I think it's October but I can't be sure. I haven't kept a calendar for five years’

Director: John Hillcoat (The Proposition)
Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, Michael K. Williams, Charlize Theron
DVD Release: 17 May 2010
108 minutes
United States

Possible Spoilers Ahead

The Road Summary

The Road winds through a landscape that that will be familiar to all. Familiar yet brutally changed, bleached of color and stripped of life. Like the echo of a long forgotten song the images resonate, playing with the mind as they feebly try to latch on to substance where there now is all but none.

The characters that inhabit this bleakest of storyboards are also peeled of their names. They exist only as their base element in a world were labels are as useless as the scattered banknotes that now lay soggy on the scorched earth. And it is in this place that The Man (Viggo Mortensen) and his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) are caught up with as they relentlessly travel southward.

The Road Film Stylishly Mirrors Cormac McCarthy’s Bleak World

An unknown catastrophe has left the world ruined. A thick layer of ash covers the ground and blocks out the suns life giving rays. There is no sound save for an errant wind as it whips at the drizzling acid rain and the slosh of trolley wheels as scavenged sustenance is pushed through the gloom.

In a deviation from Cormac McCarthy novel the character of the man’s wife (Charlize Theron) is here given more substance. The book had her only fleetingly referred to in flashback, a memory that fades ultimately giving way to the immediacy of survival. The film ably continues to restrict her to fevered dreams and hazed memories. And it is from here that she inadvertently provides balance and heart wrenching dilemma to the path on which the thrust of the story adheres.

The sole impetus behind The Road is the man's unflinching love for his young son. It takes prescience over all else. Even the passion he once felt for his wife succumbs to his dedication toward his child's survival. And it is her ultimate inability to travel the road ahead that casts a shadow that the man never truly escapes from.

The book has its reader licking his dry lips as these fictitious traveler's venture ever deeper into thirst and starvation. The movie too manages to place us in the fray but the story must unfold so rapidly on screen that in this format the sensation is somewhat diminished. This is no fault of the filmmakers and as the final credits begin to roll you still do feel deep inside the sensation of having devoured something moving and visceral.

Viggo Mortensen Takes to The Road

A number of characters are met on this sluggish road trip through Hades. Each one is served with an increasingly paranoid performance by the films most indispensable component, Viggo Mortensen. This is an actor in full immersion, embodying The Man with a chiseled husk from which only a piercing gaze radiates even the slightest semblance of life. He is crushing as he flashes back to his past life; privileged, husband to a beautiful wife, jubilant father to be, only to always return to a reality that has been all but reduced to naught.

Robert Duvall offers reprieve from the rapidly encroaching and ever present dread that trails the man and his son. As a near blind drifter he is a brief nod to humanity and the notion that not all is tainted and corrupt. Michael K. Williams (The Wire’s Omar Little) arrives near the films conclusion as the final personification of Mortensen's paranoia and distrust. He is literally stripped, even of his filthy rags and discarded as a symbol of the narratives wavering distinction between good and evil.

The Boy, is a part shouldered with mostly competent zeal by newcomer, Australian Kodi Smit-McPhee. He has not an enormous amount of dialog though what isn’t said is implied through a genuine onscreen chemistry. But the slow burning emotional thump that is evoked between man and boy is undermined by Smit-McPhee’s delivery, one that at times grates rather than endears. This aside, his is a performance that has rightly already garnered critical praise. A shame though perhaps that the producers couldn’t have found a more visually excruciating way to portray his emaciation; this kid looked just a little too well-fed.

The Road – Bleak and Intoxicating

The Road is a hard sell. Its surely not the feel-good movie of the year and a prospective girlfriend may not thank you for taking her to see it but this a film of necessary despair. It is a monotone glimpse at a horrific scenario that threatens to be anything but fiction. The image of mighty lurching trees starved of nutrition collapsing under their own weight is one set to become indelible. You must travel The Road but it won’t be enjoyable. 4/5