The Road Review

I find myself in an interesting, and lamentably rare, situation when it comes to The Road. I've actually read the book. I do read more than those first two sentences would suggest, honest! It's also one of my favourite books but I did try and approach the film as objectively and with as fresh a perspective as I could. The fact that it's directed by John Hillcoat, who directed The Proposition, gave hope. Cormac McCarthy's book drips with atmosphere and menace and The Proposition is one of the most atmospheric and tonally interesting films of the last few years. A good match then, perhaps. What struck me when watching The Road was that, a huge part of what made me love the book was not what it was about, but how it was written. Of course the film doesn't have the benefit of McCarthy's terse prose and so what you are left with is the narrative of the book which, to the best of my memory, is actually adhered to pretty faithfully by writer Joe Penhall, a narrative that is somewhat slight and episodic.

Viggo Mortensen plays the man, Kodi Smit-Mcphee plays the boy. Both are struggling to survive in the aftermath of an unamed apocalypse, travelling south along the eponymous road to the coast, avoiding those survivors who would use them for food and occasionally bumping into Robert Duvall or Guy Pearce who must surely be a shoe in for Best Supporting Fake Teeth at this year's awards season. And that's kind of all there is to it. As I said, that's all there is to the story of the book also, but the narrative deficiencies take centre stage in the film. Central to the story is this relationship between man and boy and both actors do well, Viggo in particular looking dirty, haggard and gaunt having presumably thrown himself method style into the role. The problems arise as the boy constantly pesters his Dad about who is good and who is bad. Rather than leading to an interesting grey area of survival in which no one is necessarily good or bad, we have the man and boy who are good because they don't eat people and the cannibals who are bad because they do. The boy questions his father's way of protecting them even as they are being attacked by those who would harm them and the theme loses any weight and believability as a result. Yes he's a child but all he has ever known is the apocalypse, all he has ever known is danger, dread, hunger and fear, so shouldn't he be savvy to his world by now? Shouldn't he understand the consequences if they don't defend themselves at all costs, violently if that's necessary? This adds a level of immaturity to either the character if it's deliberate or the script if it's not and either way I found it problematic.

What is most surprising however, is that I expected the film to assault me with its atmosphere and tone and it really didn't. Whereas The Proposition was relentless (to the point of being problematic to many critics but not to me) The Road actually becomes somewhat tiresome at times. Lots of washed out colours, plenty of grey, but nothing ever changes and at a certain point I found myself desensitised to the whole thing, apathetic when I should have been on the edge of my seat. There are some flashbacks to life before the apocalypse, with Charlise Theron playing Viggo's wife, "the woman" presumably, and these work to mixed effect. They provide a break from the unremitting grimness of the present but they don't inform the character of the man and storywise they could happily be excised and nothing would be lost.

I feel like I'm coming down pretty hard on The Road. I don't feel like this is a case of "I loved the book and you ruined it with the film", the problems are there on the screen. Like many of the films I've seen recently, The Road isn't terrible, it has much to commend and enjoy. I just found myself struggling to understand the point of it, what it was I was supposed to take from it. I've waited a few days to write this review as I haven't been sure what I thought about the film and I'm not sure I can articulate it even now. I guess my advice would be, read the book.

5-6/10