The Road

Confession time: I haven’t read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I love McCarthy, I thought the book sounded great, and it was hardily recommended by friends for whose taste in literature I harbor nothing but the highest admiration. Still, I never read the fucking thing. I guess the best argument I can make on my lazy behalf is that no other novel in recent memory better fits the category of book described in the first chapter of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler as: “Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too.” That being said, I have nothing to compare John Hillcoat’s adaptation (written by nobody screenwriter John Penhall) of The Road to other than other post-apocalyptic movies, a job Hillcoat’s somber-as-fuck existential film goes a long way toward making irrelevant. It’s clearly its own thing. In some ways it succeeds and in others it does not. In the end, the only other film it leaves me wanting to compare it to is the better film that it itself could have been w/ a number of small to mid-size adjustments. Or, perhaps, to the better film that it in fact was when in first came in at some four-and-a-half hours. Or maybe even the subsequent film that it became before once again being ushered back into editing for being too bleak for test audiences. First the triumphant end of things: The Road is a masterpiece of visual design. Flawless, even. Its incorporation of every single conceivable stop along the grey scale tour, its incredible landscape compositions, and its flattened out vistas of half-eradicated space are absolutely superb. The way its ashen, hollowed-out humans are absorbed into the gutted leftover detritus of human species activity, which itself dissolves back in to a natural world that is itself dead or dying, creates a sense of profound monoform unity. Everything is reduced to the same dismal grain, the skin of the film as sickly and washed out as that of its characters. But it is precisely this reduction of the human characters in The Road to elements of its landscape that makes its repeated attempts to rise to the level of transcendent elegy nearly impossible to achieve. The tone is too post-human and maudlin for that. It is forced to lean far too heavily on the by turns elegiac and sinister – admittedly gorgeous but always excessively foregrounded – score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and an unfortunate voiceover which pretends that this film is about Viggo Mortensen’s Man when by all rights it should really be about The Boy, played w/ some serious credibility by newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee. One suspects that the voiceover and the flashbacks to pre-apocalyptic domesticity featuring lithe Charlize Theron as increasingly moribund mommy, were heavily padded-on after the film’s poor performance at test screenings. Were the Weinsteins and the folks at Dimension honestly hoping to proffer an adaptation of The Road onto the general public which people somehow wouldn’t find bleak? By using the voiceover and tying it into flashbacks that are supposed to be dreams, the film puts itself in the wrong head, and does so sloppily at that. It’s just not credible. The flashbacks work when they are at their most fragmentary: two sets of hands playing on a piano briefly breaking away for a caress, the wife before an iced-over window behind which a fire appears to be frostily burning, the synthetic appropriation of an inner thigh, the play of sun on a sundress. But when large blocks of the past play out it feels like a cheat. I mean who dreams convenient bits of backstory when they go to sleep at night? All that these flashbacks are ultimately good for, soundtracked as they are by insistent music and poetic voiceover mewlings, is 1) reminding the viewer how much better Terrence Malick is at this stuff, and 2) undermining a potentially powerful film about how a father’s love for his son becomes a distorted, prismatic splintering of itself into something morally blurry and increasingly monstrous. Taking away Mortensen’s voiceover would go a long way toward making him more frightening, the implication of his dogged way-the-fuck-beyond-the-pale love for his son more suffocating, and the final release of his son from this protracted bondage at the film’s end, on the shores of the horizonless Gulf Coast, more liberating (if not exactly hopeful). This is the story of a man who holds his son hostage, two suicide bullets left in his revolver, by using the boy as his only reason to go on, as an excuse to see all other human beings as a threat, and as a source of hope where there determinedly is none. The Man is, after all, the figure in this dyad who stands in for the civilization whose hubris got it snuffed out in the first place. It is The Boy who is slowly made aware of this, as he grudgingly comes to realize that they are not unconditionally the “good guys” after all, that “good” is in fact a dead luxury, and that there may not be any kind of evil his father would not be willing to engender in his son’s name. There is a key point somewhere in this film where The Boy becomes terrified of The Man, and it is this exact moment, difficult if not impossible to pinpoint, upon which everything rests. Anytime The Boy turns to another he is chastened by the paranoiac father. The family that takes The Boy in at the end of the film is given away by the presence of their dog as the cause of the noises which precipitated the departure of our duo, at father’s brash insistence, from the underground bunker where they had enough food and supplies to last them a very long time indeed. It is the paranoia brought about by his deformed, mutant love that gets The Man killed and effectively leaves his son to his own meager devices. In reality, though, it is not until this monstrous father is vanquished that the son can begin to live out his final days w/ any degree of efficacy whatever. That yr father – the fundamental support without whom there would be no norm, no ability to accept frustration, to obey any prohibition, without whom there is no law or moral code – is in fact a monster made such by his love for you: this is the root of a child's nightmare, where there is nothing left to protect you from the only one left to protect you. To discover – in a world of hillbilly cannibal marauders, walls of fire, and regular tree-felling earthquakes – that the one you love the most is the one you most have to fear: this is the very heart of The Road’s true horror story.