As a fan of Cormac McCarthy’s bleakly beautiful book, I was always going to have high standards for John Hillcoat’s film of The Road, but in the end I was very impressed. The film didn’t quite have the same horrifying impact as the book, but I would imagine that no film could manage that.
Visually, in particular, Hillcoat has done an excellent job, and the cinematography somehow echoes very precisely the tone of McCarthy’s descriptions of the blasted landscape of a post-apocalyptic America. The film uses a subtly expressive palette of greys and washed out colours to make the country’s bare trees and abandoned buildings suitably forbidding, but eerily beautiful.
A haggard-looking Viggo Mortensen gives a great performance as the father trudging across this landscape, trying to keep himself and his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) alive in a world where little hope is left. The two of them carry the vast majority of the screen time unaided, and this is, essentially, a film about parenthood, about the terror of bringing children into a harsh world and then struggling to protect them.
Smit-McPhee also gives a good performance, as the son who gives the story its moral heart, showing how a lifetime of trusting no one has worn him out, and shaken his belief that the pair of them really are “the good guys”. Flashbacks show how the boy’s mother (Charlize Theron) gave up hope in the face of a future that seemed without meaning, and the audience can certainly sympathise with her despair. But, for the father, his son is enough to redeem his continuing existence.
The Road is a thought-provoking and disturbing film, which will linger long in the mind after watching.
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