The Road

Never before has the end of the world been depicted in such grim and austere style as in John Hillcoat’s remarkable and moving The Road.

This touching story of a father’s love for his young son, as they journey south through a dying world in search of food and a future, has been adapted for the screen by UK playwright Joe Penhall from Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name. First published in 2006, the book was praised as ‘trenchant and terrifying, written with stripped-down urgency and fueled by the force of a universal nightmare’ by the New York Times, and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Its visceral, atmospheric prose describes a nightmare world of cannibalism, desperation and bitter cold; a world which Penhall’s screenplay has captured in chilling, confronting detail.

No cause is given for the apocalypse which has turned the soil to ash, occluded the sun, and reduced civilization, not even in the handful of flashbacks which flesh out the story; all we know is that the disaster is all-consuming, and that life has virtually ceased to exist.

Through this wasteland of rusting cars and dying forests wander the Man (Viggo Mortensen, The Lord of the Rings, Eastern Promises) – and the Boy (young Australian actor Kodi Smit-McPhee, Romulus, My Father) – ‘each the other’s world entire,’ as McCarthy describes them in his novel. The Man carries a gun containing only two bullets – “one for you, one for me,” he tells his son – the only weapon he has save his ingenuity to ward off the dangers of this cold and desperate world.

The Man is grizzled, careworn, coughing up blood and desperate to keep his son alive. The Boy is compassionate, tender, brimming with hope and wonder despite the strictures of his short life. Together, father and son are “carrying the flame,” clinging to the last vestiges of civilized behaviour as they slowly travel south towards an ocean which may no longer be blue, scavenging what food they can while avoiding their few fellow survivors – with good reason, as we learn in a chilling and terrible scene set in an isolated farmhouse.

Having not read the book upon which The Road is based, I cannot testify to the accuracy of the adaption, though from other critics I have learned that one of the novel’s more confronting scenes – the discovery of a new-born baby spit-roasted by its starving parents – has been omitted by Penhall (who also adapted Jake Arnott’s cult crime novel The Long Firm for television) from the screenplay.

Generally it seems as if the book’s more horrific elements have been softened in order to focus more on the pivotal relationship between the Man and the Boy, turning the film into “an adult fairytale about the passing of one generation to another, that inescapable reality of mortality and the archetypal parent’s greatest fear, guilt and heartbreak in leaving the child behind (and by extension everyone’s fear of being left behind utterly alone),” as Hillcoat says in the film’s production notes.

“On another level is the morality tale, an urgent wake-up call to us all where kindness, trust, hope and faith must prevail against all odds in the face of impending destruction and horror. On another is the immediate visceral reality of a dark epic adventure filled with terror and tenderness,” the director adds.

That “terror and tenderness” are superbly conveyed by Mortensen and Smit-McPhee, who are excellent throughout. Both bring a subdued intensity to their roles, blowing the other main players – most notably Charlize Theron as the Woman, the Boy’s mother, who we meet only in flashback – off the screen.

A scene in which the Man is poised to kill the Boy before turning their gun upon himself perfectly captures the drama, terror and tenderness of these character’s desperate, scrabbling lives. But rather than putting his audience through the emotional wringer, Hillcoat has crafted a stark and subdued film which relies on suggestion rather than extravagant special effects to present its almost minimalist vision of the end of the world.

Hillcoat’s version of The Road is one that contemplates horror rather than thrusting it at the audience; a film which perfectly and memorably captures all the angst of parenthood and childhood simultaneously.

“You’re not the one who has to worry about everything!” the Man shouts at the Boy, towards the movie’s climax, his sudden anger fuelled by a growing sense of his own mortality. “Yes I am!” the Boy shouts back, highlighting the constant fear, insecurity and questioning that accompanies childhood. “I am the one!”

The Road opens nationally on January 28, 2010

THE ROAD

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