Thursday, December 3, 2009
As far as I’m concerned, John Hillcoat’s The Road is the feel-good movie of the year. No other film this year will make you feel as grateful to be alive in these troubled (but hopeful!) modern times. Alternately inspiring and unnerving, this harrowing portrait of a father and son’s struggle to survive an unspecified apocalypse will warrant serious consideration in the expanded Oscar race.
In a year in whch Hollywood’s love affair with armageddon reached new levels of uninspired excess, The Road sets itself apart from tepid end-of-the-world epics such as 2012 and Terminator Salvation by concentrating less on soulless special effects and more on the power of intimate drama.
A painfully emaciated Viggo Mortenson gives the performance of a lifetime as a character we know only as “the man,” whose boundless love for his son drives him to endure the end times at any cost. Relative newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee astounds in his portrayal of “the boy,” a child whose simplistic notions of heroes and villains are permanently distorted when his father starts committing evil in the name of survival. Other performances of note include a nearly unrecognizable Robert Duvall as an aging prophet of doom and Charlize Theron as the man’s despondent wife (seen only through a series of heartbreaking flashbacks).
The Road is based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy, the same rugged existentialist behind No Country For Old Men and All The Pretty Horses. Like the aforementioned works, this film exemplifies the very best and worst of humanity, exploring our infinite capacity for kindness and cruelty. McCarthy’s lean but lyrical dialogue meshes perfectly with the masterful direction of John Hillcoat, whose first film, the minimalist Australian western The Proposition, already seemed like a lost McCarthy tome.
Hillcoat’s version of The Road is a remarkably faithful adaptation, given the source material’s incredibly bleak subject matter and disturbing content — including a particularly unsettling scene where a child is taught how to painlessly commit suicide or another that weighs the moral pros and cons of cannibalism. But every scene of The Road is utterly indispensable, and I was pleased to note that hardly anything from the original novel had been omitted or censored. And for that rare feat alone, The Road should be considered essential viewing for audiences in search of something more than sulking vampires or giant warrior Smurfs.
Verdict: Three and a half stars
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