REVIEW | A Long and Dreary Path: John Hillcoat’s “The Road”
by Eric Kohn (September 8, 2009)
A scene from John Hillcoat's "The Road." Image courtesy of The Weinstein Company.
With its drearily brief paragraphs and poetic emphasis on imagery over dialogue, Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 post-apocalyptic novel “The Road” practically reads like a screenplay. Not unreasonably, John Hillcoat’s tense, discomfiting big screen adaptation remains almost entirely faithful to the book’s distinctive pace and tone. The maintenance of this restrained progression is key to the movie’s chilly effect, but the subtle ingredients behind such morbidity—dreary-eyed performances, an enigmatic score, visual suggestions of death and decay in nearly every frame—turn Hillcoat’s version of “The Road” into a uniquely cinematic portrait of pessimism. Like Joel and Ethan Coens’s eerily soft-spoken version of McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men,” much of the movie unfolds with grimly fleeting dialogue that sticks to the ground like lead. The conversations rarely move the plot forward. Instead, they reflect the dour environment. What “The Road” lacks in joy, however, it mostly regains in character depth. Although set in an undefined near future, it has a narrow, minimalist premise that’s easily interpretable, loosely constructed and intentionally vague. A man (Viggo Mortensen) and his boy (newcomer Kodi Smith-McPhee) wander across the desolate landscape of a charred America in the wake of some unclassified catastrophe. The boy’s mother (Charlize Theron, seen only in flashbacks) abandoned them in anguish long ago. The remaining family unit wanders south along a strip of woodsy terrain, making a desperate attempt to survive the winter and avoid hostile drifters. Their world has turned against them. Cannibals lurk in the forest and occupy homes in the countryside. Survivors travel in small groups and trust no one. Unlike other movies about a desolate future, “The Road” is intentionally one-note. Where “Mad Max” matched the setting with an archetypical western hero and his B-movie revenge motives, “The Road” relies on imprecise details for the sake of thematic continuity. The world embodies fragility and doom, but its entire mythology is composed of abstractions. The perfunctory quest stays wholly subservient to the mood. It’s a survival narrative about the futility of survival narratives, an existential rumination on lost causes. Don’t expect a solution to the enigmas behind the end-of-the-world scenario or a climactic finish. Hillcoat cautiously maneuvers around trite dramatic cadences.
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AFI Fest
AFI Fest '09
BROKEN EMBRACES
A Film By Almodovar, Starring Penelope Cruz Opens New York 11/20, Opens Los Angeles 12/11 Opens additional cities 12/25 Where is it opening by you? www.sonyclassics.com/brokenembraces/dates.html "Astonishing! A Masterpiece!" Jeffrey Lyons, KNBC Weekend Today "Cruz with Almodovar makes BROKEN EMBRACES soar!" Richard Corliss, TIME Written and Directed by Pedro Almodovar www.brokenembracesmovie.com www.facebook.com/brokenembracesmovie |
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‘The Proposition’ is hardly Hillcoat’s “inaugural” feature, it’s his third, after the great prison drama ‘Ghosts ... of the Civil Dead’, from 1988, and ‘To Have and to Hold’, made eight years later.