The Road. 112 mins. Rated MA15+. Directed by John Hillcoat. Written by Joe Penhall. Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy.
Our current generation of filmmakers’ obsession with how our world will end has resulted in a ever-increasing library of bleak, indulgent, gloomy and depressing films that try, at times impossibly hard, to reach that part of our collective psyches that may want to consider the demise of our planet and all that we know exists on it.
And while possibly no-one is expecting it to be a laugh-a-minute, there is yet to be a film that permeates the significant divide between ‘their’ wanting to tell us the story and ‘us’ wanting to embrace the cinematic result. But if ever a film has managed to challenge this ‘will you just stop telling me all the really bad news’ stand-off, then it is this one: a rare, poetic, soulful tale of how the spiritual essence of our survival is to care deeply about what happens after we are gone – not only about ourselves, but each other.
Our planet has been devastated by an apocalyptic event that has rendered it barren, ash-strewn and almost uninhabitable. A man (Viggo Mortensen) and his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) are heading south to the coast. Apart from the shopping trolley that holds all that is left of their worldly possessions, there is only a gun with two bullets in it – one for each of them to use to end their life if they find themselves at risk of being captured by the marauding cannibalistic savages that roam the desolate countryside between them and the sea. When the man is forced to use one of the bullets to defend himself and his son from being ‘collected’, it becomes imperative that they survive to reach the coast, where some semblance of hope awaits them.
Based on McCarthy’s extraordinary Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Road is an utterly compelling journey featuring an astonishing performance from Viggo Mortensen, arguably one of the most under-rated actors of his generation – and it is Mortensen’s perfectly realised performance of McCarthy’s ‘Man’ that is reason alone to see this film.
Queensland-born Hillcoat’s (The Proposition, Ghosts of the Civil Dead) loving, unsparingly intimate, fearless and uncompromising direction is faultless. Gershon Ginsburg’s Art Direction and Chris Kennedy’s (The Proposition) production design perfectly render a world of iconic architectural and environmental ruin and desolation, and without exception, every one of The Road’s gruelling and inhospitable moments is captured in overwhelmingly artful and considered beauty in detail by Cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe (The Others, New Moon).
Smit-McPhee is a revelation as the ‘Boy’ – and the scenes he shares with Mortensen in an apparently abandoned underground larder (where the film’s welcome lightness of touch and nostalgia for a world destroyed are most welcome) are extraordinarily touching. An unrecognisable Robert Duvall shines in his cameo as ‘Eli’ and Charlize Theron is perfect in her brutal and confronting cameo as the Man’s fatalistically defeated wife.
The only aspects preventing The Road from being considered a true masterpiece are its capitulation into muddied and bloodied shlock horror territory with an unfortunate and gratuitous abandoned fairground sequence, and its incredibly unsatisfying ending – which to all intents and purposes, appears to be tacked on to the devastating penultimate imagery that underlines the film’s almost entire purpose of being. No, it’s certainly not going to be entertaining, but great work in the post-apocalyptic genre – of which this film is a stunning example – goes some of the way toward defining for us that essence of our survival. And how important it is that we care.
No comments:
Post a Comment