Reviews » The Road
The Other Side of the Road
Australian director John Hillcoat's stately Western "The Proposition" (2005) was a stark, mystical story about a civilization's confrontation with its own barely repressed savagery. In mounting an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's austere apocalyptic novel "The Road", Hillcoat is working with a similar theme, and has found an even more suitable narrative context for the earlier film's end-of-a-world tone, eschewing only the dust browns and evening blues of "The Proposition" for the harsh whites, grays, and blacks appropriate to the wintry devastation of McCarthy's vision. Although Hillcoat thus comes well prepared to an adaptation of The Road, his film version nevertheless has the disadvantage of greeting legions of viewers, less familiar with "The Proposition", perhaps, than with McCarthy's novel, who may be suspicious of an attempt to transpose the book's rigorously affecting prose to the cinema. His effort is also coming on the successful heels of 2007's film version of McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men", an Oscar winner and an intimidating benchmark by any measure.
Both film and novel tell the story of a pair of characters - a man and his young son - who search for food, shelter, safety, and spiritual sustenance in a ravaged post-apocalyptic American landscape. The father, known only as "The Man," is played by Viggo Mortensen, in an impressive performance that recalls the single-minded determination of the protagonists in his recent films with David Cronenberg (2005's A History of Violence and 2007's Eastern Promises). Unlike those characters, however, who both had something in their past to hide, Mortensen's character is stripped bare of all purpose besides that dictated by the need for survival. Fearful of his and his son's ability to endure another winter in the north, the man and his boy (played by newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee) head south, along "the road" of the film's title which, as in the book, serves as both a concrete narrative motif as well as a metaphor for the characters' search for spiritual renewal.
In an environment marked by human cannibalism and the most brutal forms of survival of the fittest, the man sees his son - born during the apocalypse, he has known no other world - as a possible sign of humanity's spiritual and moral redemption. Fortunately, Hillcoat keeps this theme - full of potential sentimentalism - subtle (at least until the end of the film). Rather than overloading the relationship with metaphorical or sentimental heft, he keeps it grounded, focusing on concrete moments between father and son (for example, the boy's first - and likely last - sip of soda from a can, discovered in an abandoned shack, or a moment in which the man and the boy find clean water with which to give themselves a rare bath) and placing narrative emphasis on moments driven less by profundity and more by suspense (confrontations with cannibals, for example, in which father and son narrowly escape certain death).
Given the self-conscious artistry of the McCarthy text, however, it is striking that Hillcoat's approach is marked by its modesty. He has refashioned McCarthy's story into nothing more - or less - than an effective, and frequently moving, genre film. This modesty, however, is the source of both the film's virtues and shortcomings. Hillcoat's imagery is very tightly tethered to the experience of his two protagonists, mostly restricting our knowledge of narrative space to what the man and the boy can presently see and hear. At the same time, his visuals, framed with the horizontal and vertical lines of the devastated roads, trees, and hillsides guiding our eye out of the frame, suggest a world of danger that exists beyond the man and the boy, and the film is thus able to evoke a larger sense of loss and uncertainty even as its narrative focus remains narrowed. But while effective in its stark evocation of a world at end, the images remain mostly functional, rarely reaching for the poetic heights one might expect of a director moved to film McCarthy's prose. This is not an inherent defect in the imagery itself - which is frequently striking despite the greater privilege given to narrative and character - but rather a byproduct of the narrative's ceaseless need to move forward, a choice that keeps the surface content of the source novel intact, and in the foreground, while stripping the film of the contemplative space so central to an experience of McCarthy's book.
In transposing McCarthy's prose to the world of genre conventions, Hillcoat, having nevertheless made a handsome film, has thus eschewed the poetic and stylistic ambition that someone like Terrence Malick might have been able to bring to the material. He has also avoided, to the film's greater detriment, some of the novel's trickier moral quandaries. McCarthy's book unfolds in a paratactic structure, in which blocks of paragraphs do not so much flow together but are juxtaposed so as to pose to the reader the interpretive question of how symbols and motifs in each block are to be associated and interpreted. Although the ostensible content of McCarthy's book will be familiar to anyone who has read a post-apocalyptic narrative (like many of his other novels, it is built upon genre iconography), the novel's lightly discontinuous structure nevertheless evokes a world in which both morality and spirituality and are in tatters, and must be reconnected again by both reader and character. Indeed, in the book, the man's effort to continually remind his son that they are the "good guys" is not an expression of moral certitude, but rather an attempt to convince his son that humanity and morality might be reconstituted, that there might be other human beings in their desolate world who are good. The boy's burden also becomes the reader's.
Hillcoat poses no such difficulty for his viewer, moral or otherwise. Our allegiance to the man and his boy is certain throughout (and by film's end, begins to lapse into the kind of sentimentalism that Hillcoat astutely avoids through most of the first half). Whereas encounters with other human beings are fraught with ambiguity in the book, both music and character typage serve to telegraph the film's moral vision well in advance. During a first encounter with a group of baddies, for example, we see them ride in on a jeep and the men are dressed not unlike the villains in Mad Max (1979). A pair of encounters with an old man and a thief near the end of the film introduce a welcome measure of ambiguity into the proceedings, but these are exceptions to the rule and by the time of their appearance the film's moral compass is rigidly set. Where McCarthy's prose challenges us to orient ourselves morally in a world without morals, Hillcoat's adaptation provides us with a moral map from its opening act. In this the adaptation is at its most conservative.
Even given its limitations and self-imposed modesty, Hillcoat's The Road is nevertheless frequently an effective piece of cinema. Mortensen and Smit-McPhee impressively communicate the nature of a relationship struggling to keep its bond in the face of devastation. Some of McCarthy's readers may bemoan the especially creaky literalness of the film's flashbacks, which intermittently glance back to the man's past as a happy husband with a pregnant wife (embodied, in only a few minutes' worth of screen time, by Charlize Theron). In the novel, the man's memories are abstract and uncertain, and as a result, his memories of his wife become a shorthand for McCarthy to evoke what all of humanity has lost. In the film, Hillcoat, grounded by the unavoidably concrete nature of narrative imagery, is more interested in what just one man hast lost, and might still lose. If Hillcoat's flashbacks are reductive of the novel's sparsely conveyed power, his present-tense scenes are nevertheless acute in their sense that in holding on his son, the man is holding onto the value of humanity. "Maybe there's another father and his boy on the other side?" Mortensen remarks after his son asks him what might lie on the other side of the beach. It's in moments like these that the film's narrow focus expands, movingly evoking the largest possible loss through the plight of one man.
JGCinema - Jura Gentium Cinema - Cinema and Globalization