The Road

The Road

By Jonathan Fisher, January 29th, 2010

Bleak, hypnotic, and not without the slightest glimmer of hope, The Road is a difficult but powerful masterpiece. Somewhere among the emaciated, weathered faces, the barren wastelands and the once-banal shopping trolleys and town squares that now function as a man’s last hope for survival, the true essence of humanity is captured. That essence, first captured so eloquently and austerely by Cormac McCarthy in his novel of the same name, is brought to cinematic life by Australian director John Hillcoat. The Proposition also thrust itself headfirst into the darkness of human character under enormous strain. The Road explores what will become of our fragile social niceties if the cushions of civilisation were to perish.


It’s impossible for me to view Hillcoat’s adaptation of The Road in isolation. I devoured McCarthy’s book, and know it intimately. Any perception I have of the film is coloured by the fact that I am so familiar with its source material. I found this adaptation to be perfect -- dark and dank in its cinematography, stark and raw in its performance, and powerful in its message. If there was a criticism, it is that the tiniest excess of hope is added to the movie’s ending. McCarthy’s novel is almost entirely without hope. I suppose no studio would entirely back a film that would reflect that.

Viggo Mortenson plays a father (he is credited in the film as playing a character named “The Man”), holding his son’s hand as he guides him through the desolation that is the United States after… what, exactly? We don’t know in this film, nor are we ever told in McCarthy’s book. One must assume that it was some kind of apocalyptic Holocaust, brought about by nuclear weapons. The specifics of the event do not matter -- be it a wide-scale terrorist attack, or a conflict between two or more superpowers. The end result is the same. The world has become an empty and unforgiving place. What people are left are not to be trusted -- even if they are harmless-looking old men like the one that Mortenson and son run into, played by an unrecognisable Robert Duvall. Not everyone is as harmless as the old man. Some band in groups, intent on killing and eating any isolated survivors they come across. Others probably weren’t bad people back when civilisation thrived, but understandably would steal any food and portable shelter that they would come across. The Road reminds us that humans are only as nice to each other as civilization allows. Right now we live in a world where the biggest thing much of the West has to worry about is if they’ll splurge 50 cents on adding avocado to their food-court gourmet sandwich. We’re a long way from our primordial origins.

Australian Kodi Smit-McPhee (the young child from Romulus, My Father) plays Mortenson’s son. Their relationship is powerful purely because John Hillcoat never once sentimentalises it. They are simply father and son, and if Mortenson has one overpowering instinct now that he must fend for himself, it is to protect his child. Their relationship is carved  out of tough love on Mortenson’s part, and unwavering trust on Smit-McPhee’s. The father also knows his body well enough to know that he is dying, and eventually his young son will be left to survive only with the skills and toughness that he teaches him. McCarthy wrote his novel shortly after his first child was born. McCarthy, reflecting on his own age, realised that he will not be around much longer than the child’s first 20 or so years. The Road posits that the most important role a father plays is not necessarily one of loving his child, but of preparing it for the hell-hole that the real world can be.

The plot of the film is not complex. Mortenson leads his son on a journey to find the coast. What he thinks they will find there is unclear, but since he comes across as a smart man, he surely knows that salvation does not wait. Humans need a reason to try -- for this father and son, the coast represents a hope that is misplaced and illusory, but to them is very real. They must believe that their suffering has meaning.

On their journey, the father and son encounter the aforementioned old man and cannibalistic gang, as well as an abandoned bomb shelter full of food, a trigger-happy stranger and a desperate thief. The transposition of the book’s most terrifying moment -- a basement full of emaciated prisoners so twisted and malnourished that they have crossed into the realm of ghouls -- survives the jump from page to screen. A scene like that one proves that this adaptation of The Road is not afraid to pull its punches.

The Road evokes the poetic feel of the novel by utilising a voice-over from Mortenson’s perspective. Narration is often an over-used tool used by lazy writers (as Robert McKee taught us in Adaptation), but here it is almost poignant as the last mental records of a man who feels, and knows, that he is completely alone. Think of the way the narration in Taxi Driver expressed Travis Bickle’s damaged psyche. In The Road's case, though, Mortenson is correct in thinking that he is God’s last lonely man.

I am aware that I’ve made many references and comparisons to the novel. A film based on source material should, of course, stand on its own. But I know the mood and feel of the book too well to divorce myself from it -- to pretend that I watched The Road in a vacuum would be disingenuous and dishonest. Let it be said that I found The Road to be a haunting, vivid and soul-rending experience. Perhaps that is because I am so intimate with the source material, and believe it articulates a saddening world view without succumbing to nihilism or excessive melancholy.  That perspective, I believe, survives the transition to the silver screen, and the end result is nearly as powerful as McCarthy’s novel.