You know a movie’s not going to end well when a man shows his young son how to put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger.
But this is how things are in The Road. After an unspecified apocalypse, the sun doesn’t shine, crops and animals have died, and civilization has been replaced with thieves, killers, and cannibals. It’s a world where you make sure your gun has enough bullets left for you and the ones you love, because that’s surely one of the kinder fates available.
The Road is one of the bleakest movies you’re likely to see. There’s a pervasive sense of dread that hangs over everything, the knowledge that something bad could happen at any time. Anyone the man and his son meet on the road could be dangerous, any building they enter may not have an exit. When there’s a moment of peace or contentedness, it feels like the setup for something horrible, the calm before the cannibals.
But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. The Road isn’t an action-overloaded, everyone running about in slow-mo while the apocalypse explodes in glorious CGI. It’s an intimate, often tender portrait of the end of the world. There’s action and suspense, but it’s secondary to the relationship between the Man (Viggo Mortenson) and his son (13 year-old Kodi Smit-McPhee). It’s a strong emotional core, giving the audience a reason to care as well as fuelling the already considerable suspense.
After all, there’s nothing in the film more horrifying than the prospect of something happening to the boy. The boy is the only reason for hope, for love. He’s possibly the only thing keeping the man human – at times, the man’s paranoia and hardness threaten to overwhelm his humanity, but the boy brings him back.
Mortenson is given the task of anchoring the film, a job that rests fairly well on his shoulders. He’s great at looking intense without being merely angry, at saying a lot without dialogue. There’s a softness under his tough exterior, a genuine love for the boy beneath his fierce desire to protect him. Smit-McPhee fits well, for the most part; with Mortenson doing most of the heavy emotional lifting, the boy’s role is often limited. One of his most important tasks is to merely be a child, albeit a child surrounded by death and destruction. It’s a nicely grounded performance, though there are some scenes towards the end where he can’t quite convey the emotionally gravity that is called for.
The rest of the cast is enough to make most directors drool: Charlize Theron as the man’s wife, Robert Duvall as a fellow traveller, Gerret Dillahunt as a roving scavenger, Michael K. Williams as a man with a knife. They’re small roles, with only Theron needing to make a serious emotional impact, but all are performed almost perfectly. You’re never quite sure what to make of most of the characters: Anyone the man and his son meet on the road could be harmless, helpful, or horrible. All of the performances are kept fairly subtle, so we can only see them through the paranoid and protective eyes of the man.
The main flaw of The Road is its episodic nature. The man and his son travel south, towards hopefully warmer climates. They encounter people, a place, or a thing. They deal with the situation, somehow, and then continue travelling until they encounter another set of people, places, and things. And repeat. They all work individually, but the pattern becomes repetitive towards the end of the film, with a general lack of forward momentum; most of the sequences could be rearranged without too much impact.
The structure inherited from a novel may be the film’s weakness, but the language of Cormac McCarthy’s novel – often conveyed almost verbatim in Mortenson’s monologues – becomes one of the greatest strengths. It’s beautiful, haunting prose, sparse, full of desperation and hope. “The boy is my warrant,” the man says early on, “if he is not the word of god, then god never spoke,” and it will stay with you for the rest of the film. Literary prose can often sound stilted or unnatural when spoken aloud, but McCarthy’s text, delivered by Mortenson’s weary voice, is cinematic gold.
My one major disappointment with the film may lie in the novel, too, though I haven’t yet read it so can’t be sure. (It’s sitting on my bedside table right now. Don’t hassle me.) The ending feels abrupt and sudden. There’s the emotional climax, and then things just wrap up a bit too quickly, as though the filmmakers suddenly ran out of time. (Though at 111 minutes, The Road isn’t particularly long.)
The Road reminds me more than a little of Last Night, another movie about the end of the world that was less about the disaster than the people. Last Night was much lighter – everything short of The Pianist is lighter than The Road – but it held the similar view that it doesn’t matter if the world is ending if you don’t care about the people in it. The Road has more to say about the end of the world itself, and has ample thrills and scares, but its always guided by the characters, real people forced to survive in a nightmare. It’s a haunting, intense, and disturbing film, full of horrible people driven to do terrible things, but you can’t help leaving the film feeling a little hopeful, and moved by the love, devotion, and sacrifice on display.
