The Road Review

I read the vast majority of The Road last summer whilst travelling the length of the 171 bus route from Catford to Holborn and back. It isn’t that I’m a particularly fast reader; it’s just that Cormac McCarthy’s sparse prose is nothing if not economic. The best thing about The Road as a novel is how much vivid detail McCarthy conjures with so few words. The grey, ruined America of the book is painted in your mind almost from nowhere. And one of the great things about John Hillcoat’s fine adaptation is how well this world is visualised on screen. One wouldn’t be surprised if the Australian director had actually scorched significant bits of countryside to recreate McCarthy’s unnamed disaster.

For the uninitiated, The Road concerns an anonymous Man and his Young Boy travelling south across a post-apocalyptic countryside in search of whatever they can find to keep them alive. A predictably intense Viggo Mortensen and equally impressive Kodi Smit-McPhee star as the two survivors. I was lucky enough to be invited to a screening hosted by the Barbican which was followed by a Q&A with Hillcoat. Hillcoat was clearly in awe of his source material but much to my delight was unafraid to take small liberties with the text, subtly chopping and changing it to suit its new medium. What he has made remains faithful to the novel but also stands on its own two feet as a separate and significant entity.

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s minimalist score stirs and impresses; Javier Aguirresarobe’s cinematography is both daunting and beautiful despite the intentionally coarse and unpleasant looks of the production design; and Hillcoat masterfully paces the film in such a way that its 111 minute duration seems to fly by. Also commendable is the constant atmosphere of menace – at any moment you feel things could go terribly wrong for the duo.

Thankfully there are very few negative comments to be made about the film. The sparing use of a voiceover narration works, but only just and some may find the few flashback sequences in the film slightly clunky. Others still may find the film relentlessly morbid, though for my money, Hillcoat has captured the untainted love between man and his son that provides hope for them in a brutally hopeless world.

The much delayed release of The Road seems clearly engineered to provide it with a good run during the forthcoming awards season, its producers no doubt hoping to replicate the success of McCarthy’s previously adapted work, No Country for Old Men (Hillcoat claimed that he was satisfied with the film’s success already as it had impressed the esteemed author). The Road has also arrived in the middle of a spate of much sillier apocalypse movies – 2012, Carriers and the forthcoming Book of Eli and Legion (which features mankind’s destruction via the medium of heaven-sent machine gun wielding angels – seriously). Where one postulates The Road will stand out from these is in its reality-based, post-9/11 and post-Katrina influenced realism, which delivers a gut punch on a much more personal level.