The first few minutes of The Road, director John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s relentlessly bleak post-apocalyptic novel, tell you pretty much everything you need to know about the rest of the movie. A handful of stand-alone shots metonymize everything the world is about to lose: pretty pink flowers, a soulful-eyed horse. (Viggo Mortensen really has a way with horses on camera.) It’s manipulative and obvious, I suppose, but it works. Then the mysterious disaster occurs, and before we cut to the opening titles we hear the most memorable lines from the book as Mortensen’s nameless protagonist quickly fills his tub with water while his nameless wife looks on: “Why are you taking a bath?” “I’m not.” Man was I ever stunned and devastated by that line when I first read it; launching the movie with it is super-smart. Finally we get to the main business of a man and his son trudging through the ruined world, and as Mortensen’s narration kicks in, it’s almost difficult to believe how careworn and ground down he sounds. Every line is delivered like he’s been on the receiving end of days’ worth of beatings attempting to extract information he’s told us a thousand times he doesn’t have. We see his craggy, scraggly face, his mouth set with a skull’s teeth, and it’s like if Aragorn were wandering around without hope in a world where Sauron got the Ring back. But then you notice the utterly conventional score by Bad Seeds Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and it’s like ugh, Oscar bait, thanks for playing, goodnight.
Aside from the overscoring and one sequence of bogus suspense involving a then-faceless antagonist that’s shot like something out of a Lifetime movie, there’s nothing bad about The Road. But aside from Mortensen, and a series of holy-shit casting decisions that end up giving us a World Tour of Wonderful Actors from the Great HBO Dramas of the ’00s, there’s nothing about it that feels essential, either. The Tracker-esque ruin and squalor is shifted into that slightly bluish prestige-movie color palette. Charlize Theron’s role is nowhere near as beefed up as rumor had it but nor does it do much but establish that there’s a gorgeous blonde movie star who can also act in the movie (I didn’t buy her fate at all, particularly compared to Mortensen’s reaction to it at the moment and remembrances of it in the future). The moments of horror are kind of expected and bland, except for a couple toward the end that are combined with pathos. And throughout, that score, telling us exactly how to feel at any given moment. I kept imagining the movie without music, like the Coen Brothers’ McCarthy adaptation No Country for Old Men–everything would have improved like (snap) that.
But this film lacked that film’s confidence, both in itself and in its audience. Which I sort of understand. I mean, the subject matter here is even more brutal, which the film does a good job of establishing through intermittent scenes of the Man’s casualness about exposing the Boy to dead bodies. Life has really broken down, and I appreciate the need to give us some outs to dealing with that now and then. In fact I actually applaud the film’s elision of two of the book’s most difficult scenes, involving a dog and a baby; I spent the movie dreading them, simply unsure if I’d be able to take them, and I fortunately didn’t have to. (This also set up a pretty terrific final couple of shots.) Still, on the level of the look and sound of the thing, I was just getting too much reassurance, reassurance that I was watching a motion picture that would address, in ultimately satisfactory fashion, the big questions. The movie seemed to see its job as one of softening the blow. Even though I’m getting to the point (as I realized throughout the screening) where I sort of feel like something’s gotta give with my whole constant rubbing-my-face-in-life’s-ceaseless-awfulness thing, I don’t think that satisfaction was what I was looking for.
I honestly don’t know whether I could take this movie. It might not be half as good as the novel, but seeing as reading that left me scarred for life (but hey, in a good way!), I am frankly terrified of going back to that place. I know the speshul perspective of the parent is overplayed, and whilst *I’m sure* the book would have had a profound effect on me were I not a dad, it really is astonishingly torturous from a parental point of view.
If you’ve read the book, this isn’t a must-watch. It’s strictly 4 my Viggo.
I like a bit of Viggo, but I don’t need him that bad.
I’m really disappointed to hear such negative reaction to the Cave/Ellis score – not just from you, but in across the board. I make no bones about my Cave love, and I would have thought he’d bring a suitable soundtrack to this picture.
I have no brief with Cave, but it’s not hard to imagine how his fans would feel about his work here.
I have no brief with Cave, but it’s not hard to imagine how his fans would feel about his work here.
I’ve gotten pretty impatient with uninspired scores. This is sort of embodied in Danny Elfman, who hasn’t done interesting work in like a decade. I have the Batman score on my iPod–listening to that and then putting on Spider-Man is almost physically painful. Another really convenient apples-to-apples comparison is Carter Burwell’s deft work in Twilight vs. the bland gothy-movie music of Eclipse. In a world where you’ve got Howard Shore’s Lord of the Rings opus and Jonny Greenwood’s There Will Be Blood stuff, a dull, unmemorable score is inexcusable.
Agree 100%. In fact, I think that Greenwood score was pretty much what I was hoping The Road would have, texturally and atmospherically – maybe a bit softer, to be sure, but something equally strong.
And couldn’t agree more on Elfman’s work lately – uninspired really does sum it up. I think the last score of his I liked was for “Sleepy Hollow”
On second thought, I dug some of the action bits in his “Spiderman 2” score a great deal. But, as I understand it, Raimi really pushed Elfman for something more like Christopher Young on that score, and those Spidey-Ock fights do bare a distinctly un-Elfman-like tone.