Luke
stu-kicks
CibbuanoThe Road
April 17th 2010 00:59
The trouble with adapting a widely-acclaimed and Pullitzer-price winning novel like The Road is that everyone waits for it with held breath. The filmmakers have an uphill struggle in winning over their audience before the film has even started, and fans of the novel (and I hesistate to use a word like 'fans' in reference to such a particularly bleak novel) are resistant to the film's chance at success. I've long been a defender of Hollywood's tradition of sourcing films from books, comics, older movies, etc, but even I found myself baulking at the idea of adapting Cormac McCarthy's The Road to film (I was at my most worried when I saw the presence of Charlize Theron in the trailer). But now that I've seen The Road I find myself struggling to understand why this film failed to gain any Academy Award nominations... the film so perfectly captures the book in tone, characterisation and plot that it's hard to imagine a better or more faithful adaptation.
For those unaware of this story, it concerns the end of life on our planet. An unexplained cataclysm (most likely man-made) has rendered the Earth lifeless and the last dregs of humanity eek out a harrowing, godless existence surviving on the last morsels of tinned food and the flesh of their fellow man. A man (Viggo Mortensen) and his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee, a young Australian actor who came to prominence in Romulus, My Father and is soon to be seen in the American remake of Let the Right One In) are two Americans travelling south on the roads of this wasteland. They avoid all other people (out of a valid fear of rape and cannibalism) and desperately hold onto their lives in the hope of finding something, anything, that might be a prelude to a better future.
I will warn any potential viewers right here and now that this is a relentlessly morbid and disturbing film. The man and his boy hold what they call 'the flame', meaning the spark of humanity that seems to have deserted so many of their surviving kin. The man has only the smallest flicker of hope in his soul, and the best that he hopes for is that he can equip his son to survive beyond him when he eventually dies (which he believes will be soon). Early on, the man shows his son how to commit suicide (he makes the boy place their gun in his mouth), knowing it to be preferable to the rape and slow death he will meet at the hands of other people. When the boy cries it's an awful squeaking sound that calls to mind a frightened or dying animal - it's that kind of movie. There is very little explicit violence in this film but there's a certain unbearable horror in a man no longer able to shield his son from simple brutalities like merciful suicide and larders filled with human livestock.
Mortensen is excellent as the man, he has a sensitivity about him that makes him believable as what might possibly be the last human left with any kind of morality. As the film progresses and their plight becomes worse we watch him deal with some hard truths - admitting that suicide might be the best option or realising that his young boy will soon be without him. Slowly his hope erodes away and takes with it his last remaining shreds of humanity. It starts to get to a point where the boy believes more in the man's ideals than the man does, and Mortensen does a great job of conveying his inner struggle in understanding this... that the boy truly does hold 'the flame'.
Australian director John Hillcoat (Ghosts of the Civil Dead, The Proposition) creates a stark vision of post-nuclear winter in modern-day America, relying on minimal CGI to achieve a memorably realistic end of the world. The Road starts out with a voiceover from Mortensen's character, a neccessary kickstart employed by Hillcoat to make the novel's subtexts clearer for the sake of a more focused film. The people in this world look like shabby Holocaust-hobos... an image that, when combined with the desolate wasteland they inhabit, makes The Road seem like a modern and even more depressing version of The Grapes of Wrath. I think it's a rather apt comparison that calls to mind the best and worst that humanity has to offer, a message that renders both works timeless classics despite the specific worlds they evoke.
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