The Road

Source: Amazon

In many ways a close adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's grim novel, The Road dutifully plods through the basics of McCarthy's nightmarish post-apocalyptic landscape: a father (Viggo Mortensen) and his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) try to survive as they trek along through the sodden, sunless remnants of some awful disaster. Scrounging for food and huddling together to stay warm, they spend most of their time trying to avoid the cannibalistic marauders who roam the highways. The film strikingly demonstrates that McCarthy's book was almost entirely dependent on his extraordinary language for its literary life; the story, such as it is, is so skeletal and spare it doesn't translate well into movie terms. The Proposition director John Hillcoat brings his grungy physicality to the material, so in the matters of the damp clothes and starved bodies and cheerless forests, the movie rings true. But the longer it trudges on, the more it seems a thoroughly conventional conclusion is at the end of this dystopian tale. The Road has one notable selling point: the performance of Viggo Mortensen. In his character's fierce determination to live--but also the gentle sighs he lets forth when confronted with, say, his first sip of whisky in years--Mortensen is completely in the moment, and all too human in the post-human world. --Robert Horton


Stills from The Road (Click for larger image)