Review: The Road

The Road. What can you say? First, it is one of the bleakest mainstream films yet made, almost bereft of hope. Second, it is beautiful to look at.

Let’s deal with the bleakness. The film wantonly revels in its apocalyptic misery. I understand that the film is a very faithful adaptation of the book – and thus that bleakness is inherited from its source. However, those I know that have read the book bemoan the emotional detachment of the film – a detachment not experienced when reading the book.

This detachment is not the result of poor performances from its principal cast; indeed, Viggo Mortenson and Kodi Smit-McPhee are excellent, as the father-and-son survivors of some unexplained extinction level event. Their road trip south to the east coast is peppered with frightful and violent encounters (mostly with cannibalistic fellow survivors).

These encounters, the deprivation and loneliness pile on the misery and affect the father and son (we never learn their names – almost as if, with the death of society, names no longer matter) in different ways. While the father is outwardly stoic, he is in truth more scared than the boy, his drive to survive without succumbing to evil makes him deeply cynical and distrusting of strangers. The boy is the innocent, naïve, incorruptible, curious, and kind alter-image of his father.

This duality (experience and innocence, if you’ll forgive the reversal) and the final scene carry a heavy undertow of Blake’s angelic view of the child, and an almost overt Christian subtext. The boy is hope. That final scene unleashes a cruel irony: that the society, the belonging, that the father and son have been chasing has in fact been shadowing them all along even as they have unwittingly run from it.

It’s worth comparing Avatar’s sledgehammer eco-message and its mish-mash of world faiths, with The Road’s lean, mean warning to us all: if our eco-system dies, so does our humanity.

However, that is a very hard pill to swallow. This film really is so terribly bleak. It’s worth noting that the director, John Hillcoat, was hand-picked for the film after its producer had seen Hillcoat’s The Proposition – a film almost as bleak as this. The leaden dread is reinforced by the score from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (neither know for uplifting material!).

But The Road is beautiful to look at; Javier Aguirresarobe’s cinematography (both the colours, the compositions, and the choice of lenses) is astounding - this backed by brilliant production design mean what’s left of the world is horribly real. Many of its images burn into the brain, there to stay. Given this, the film should be an immersive experience – but that detachment remains.

I simply can’t score this film. It’s not that it’s bad – it isn’t! It’s just not of my world. I have no desire to see it again. And yet the film’s stark warning remains…