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.
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