Review – The Road
Saturday, August 14th, 2010The recent spate of post apocalyptic films is interesting. I understood when it happened in the eighties since the US and Soviet Union were always rattling sabers with fingers on their proverbial buttons. Nuclear arms became The Beast in our collective consciousness and that filtered its way into our art. I get it. I don’t even know if nuclear missiles even exist. I’ve never seen one. Have you? And yet the number of films about the world before, during, and after a nuclear “event” makes me feel as though I’ve experienced, first hand, every possible outcome in a thousand different parallel universes. This is a subject that has been milked to death, no pun intended. So what is it about our world today that makes these projects viable again? Probably 9-11 and those idiots in the middle east who give the middle east a bad name. Even though the attack was doled out using planes, not bombs, it was the closest US citizens have come to the results of a nuclear attack on home soil. And it started minds, both smart ones and greedy ones, tumbling. Which brings us back to The Road.
Australian director John Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall have crafted a disturbingly memorable and realistic account of a world shrouded in the effects of nuclear winter. It is to their credit that the standard repertoire of post-apocalyptic imagery is still effective here, unlike in other recent films like The Book of Eli where that same imagery comes across as hackneyed. I think that’s due to the overwhelmingly sad human drama at work here and the effectiveness of the performers.
The Road is, first and foremost, about choices. Are we good or bad? Are we going to do the right thing or the easy thing? Is humanity basically good or evil or both? Heady stuff for a Hollywood film to take on but Hillcoat attacks these themes as if they aren’t there. By that, I mean the characters are presented as realistic people not as pawns of plot and theme as is the case with most big budget films. Even the cannibals, groups of people who band together and live off humans because that’s really their only food source, are understandable to a degree. Yes, this is a horror movie, and a love story, and a fable. And it’s the most gripping film I’ve seen in years. I think the only thing that kept it from being a larger force at the cinema was the fact that the general public has simply seen images similar to these way too frequently and they chose to pigeonhole this as another Mad Max ripoff. I’d say it owes more to Deliverance than to Mad Max but the people saw the trailers and made their judgement.
Back when I saw Viggo Mortensen costarring as “generic hot guy” in A Perfect Murder, I would have never thought that one day I’d claim him to be one of the best American actors ever, but here I sit claiming just that. His performance in The Road, along with that of the boy, Kodi Smit-McPhee, is so grounded, so rooted in honesty, that the tragedy is made visceral and my heart was broken. I understand that Viggo basically starved himself during filming so he would lose weight and also so he would feel the constant hunger that plagues his character. I’m not sure if he bathed but there is anecdotal evidence to support the claim that he was thrown out of a local restaurant during filming because they thought he was a homeless person. That really has little to do with what we end up with on screen but it does indicate the lengths to which this man will go to achieve his best work. I’ve often scoffed at method actors as I think most of them are wanna-bes, but Viggo justifies the means here.
I should also mention that the film uses very little in the way of CGI. Yes, there are some doctored shots that couldn’t be achieved any other way, but most of what we see is real. I was most impressed with the Mt. St. Helens locations and respect the difficulties that must have plagued the crew there. Still, nothing works as well as the real deal and Hillcoat should be applauded for not taking the easy way out. I was surprised to learn that there was as little CGI as there was, not because it looks like CGI but because the images are so sad and the land so devastated that it was hard for me to accept that they could possibly be real.
After the movie, I felt spoiled. I looked around me at all that I take for granted and I felt like a heel. So often we (especially in America) see those who have more than us and we wonder why we aren’t them. Why don’t I have a Mercedes? Why don’t I have better clothes? Why don’t I have a perfect family? We also take the low road so frequently and it’s not out of need but out of convenience. I can see that Cormac McCarthy’s vision is real and that makes me sad in spite of the hope represented by The Boy’s desire to be good. Is it only a matter of time before his fears make him as bad or worse than The Man? Is there any way out?




















