Suffering somewhat from January blues and not having been a fan of director John Hillcoat's previous film, the dull and grainy The Proposition, I wasn't particularly keen on watching his latest effort, which I had heard was a bleak and depressing vision of a dying Earth and also featured Nick Cave as a composer. I remember his soundtrack for Hillcoat's earlier film as being irritatingly repetitive, although I held out hope that his pairing with Bad Seeds bandmate Warren Ellis for "The Road"'s music would fix this. Nevertheless, I thought the film looked good in publicity, it had a high-calibre cast and I had read good things about it, so I went along.
I had mentally prepared myself for two and a half hours of nihilistic, misanthropic misery that could well have tipped me over the edge into postmodern hermitude. As it happened, Odeon Norwich had got the running time wrong on their Now Showing board and the film was in fact around one and a half hours of almost comically relentless nihilistic, misanthropic misery but tempered by the pure heart of The Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee), whose relationship with his father, The Man (Viggo Mortensen) provides the main thrust of the film. It is also the only real point of it, as grim survival is all that is going on in this barren, wrecked, earthquake-rent world, torn apart by some unnamed catastrophe that, like the human characters, is all the more intriuging for remaining unnamed. It's people, not effects or spectacle, that matter here and the father/son relationship is also the soul of the film.
A well chosen and distinctive character name gives the audience a clue about the identity and purpose of who they are watching, imagine if James Bond had been called Dennis Grimwood, for example? Not really a suitable moniker for a globe-trotting, ladykilling assassin and spy? Here, the characters aren't named onscreen (the two main protagonists are just credited as "The Man" and "The Boy"), giving the impression that, inhabiting a world meant to mirror reality, they are Everyman (and boy) and yet, no-one in particular, just ordinary souls trying to stay alive in extraordinary circumstances.
The nameless characters who populate this world don't need names to tell us anything about them as they are well-rounded and never less than engaging, even when glimpsed only briefly, as is the case with everyone our 'good guys' meet along the road. Perhaps that's why Hillcoat uses great actors like Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce to flesh out these fleeting roles in such a short period, in which Man and Boy often question who, including themselves, is really good or bad in their wretched world. The existence of God is also questioned, The Man at one point narrating that "If I were God, I would make the world just so..." Here, the Almighty is mentioned in a sort of abstract, rather than a literal, way. Biblically, God did make the world just so, it was us humans who messed it up and, in this film, humanity is still suffering the after-effects of its own devices. All that's left is hope, perhaps only of the vain kind, as The Man and Boy head along The Road to the coast, not really knowing what, if anything, they will find there. As it turns out, fresh hope and community is found there but will things really change for the survivors?
I liked The Road for its totally believable and terribly beautiful depiction of a post-apocalyptic landscape and admirable restraint in showing us only hints of the ongoing destruction (unlike a film such as 2012, for example), not to mention the darker effects on humanity of a world without order, such as the packs of cannibals the Man and Boy bump into at odd intervals, whose attacks on their prey aren't dwelt upon, thankfully. That said, they themselves are pushed to some extreme behaviour in the course of their journey. The music score is as sparse as the cinematography and thankfully, not at all repetitive (perhaps Hillcoat pulled Nick Cave aside before he began composing and said, "Nick, mate, could you do more than one track for this one, please?") Despite this, The Road has an off-puttingly meandering story as we follow our two road warriors as they wearily plod from one shelter to another, trying to forget The Woman (Charlize Theron) who was The Man's wife and his son's mother.
I have to admit that I was distracted during the common quieter moments by a chattering old couple behind me, plus, I fell asleep about halfway through, only to be awoken by The Man himself awaking with a start from another dream of his wife. Spooky! Still, the look of the film and the two strong central performances were involving enough so that I appreciated 'The Road', rather than be entertained by it. I have not read McCarthy's book but I have a strong feeling that this story probably works better in its original literary form.
