"The Road"
(2009, John Hillcoat, USA)
Average Contributor Rating:

The world has become a dystopian, barren, desolate place after an unspecified apocalypse occurs an unspecified amount of time ago. Only a handful of humans (and virtually no animals whatsoever) have survived, and amongst them are a gang of cannibals who will gladly do anything they possibly can to survive. We follow father and son (Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee, simply billed as Man and Boy) as they head towards the coast, avoiding trouble and trusting just about nobody.

The primary strength of “The Road” is how breathtakingly beautiful it is, despite the fact that we are simply shown image after image of a desolate new world where animals don’t roam and plants refuse to grow. There is something beautiful in its starkness, in its refusal to give even a shred of hope or joy within its visuals. Hillcoat paints his palette with soft greys and browns, creating a picture that is both utterly hopeless yet visually imposing. He uses few colours, and when he does, it is most often blood red. The few colourful images that we do get to see – a small beetle, a whisp of a rainbow – seem like momentary reprieves before we are plunged back into the bleak world created by Cormac McArthy and channelled by John Hillcoat. This sombre atmosphere would make it unidentifiable, but for the fantastic central performance of Viggo Mortensen.

Mortensen has proved himself – over the last seven years – to be one of the great triumphs of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He has gone on from his star-making turn as Aragorn to become a well respected actor in his own right. His performances in “Eastern Promises” and “A History of Violence” forged a winning relationship with director David Cronenberg, and both are superb in their own right, but this is perhaps his greatest performance to date. Shrinking down to a skeletal image, Mortensen skulks around the screen with survival as his goal. And it is not his own survival that he cares about; he simply needs to stay alive long enough to teach his son the things he needs to know, whilst in the process gaining some deep seeded paranoia and a sense of hopelessness. If the film is not about atmosphere, it is certainly about character, particularly character in the sense of worthlessness and desperation.

The supporting performances are certainly a step or two below Mortensen’s lead. It seems that the highest praise you can lay on a child actor in an American film is that it’s not annoying, and that’s the case with Kodi Smit-McPhee. He is adequate enough, refusing to fall into the trap of being yet another unlikable child performer, but failing to make any real positive impression in the process. Charlize Theron is also unimpressive, taking a role which could have been really quite powerful in its ambiguity and cheapening it somewhat. Robert DuVall and Guy Pearce are both predictably stellar, but their combined screen time barely exceeds five minutes. The negatives are few and far between to say the last, but they are certainly present, and these supporting performances are the most noticeable. I would also condemn it for being so sombre – so bleak and so humourless for the entire runtime – but it also feels like this is the very point.

The message of the film is really quite anti-Hollywood, making a mockery out of films like “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Rocky” by delivering a very anti-humane message. I guess you could argue that the point is that good people will live – and “carry the fire”, so to speak – in just about any situation, but I think the main point of “The Road” is that evil prospers in the bleakest situations. Whilst Viggo’s Man and Smit-McPhee’s Boy represent a tiny demographic of good guys (and even they have their moments of moral weakness), they are essentially hopeless, going from place to place for no reason and scraping little joy out of life in the process. The bad guys, though, have all the power, all the food, and all of what joy is left in this joyless world. It’s a sobering and quite depressing message, but one which is quite true and very poignant.