ICONIC REVIEW SCORE: 7/10
Hollywood's vision of post-apocalypse America traditionally belongs to the Mad Maxes and the cutesy robots. You might not want to live there, but a holiday wouldn't be out of the question.
Not so the empty wasteland of The Road, ravaged by some unnamed cataclysm, ankle deep in ash and drained of all colour. You've never seen so many shades of grey in a film that isn't actually black and white.
Through this emptiness walks a father, Viggo Mortensen, and his son, Kodi McPhee. They have no quest other than survival, no letters to deliver or Thunderdome to compete in. They have a shopping trolley, a gun with a few bullets, and each other.
The Road is based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize winning author who penned No Country For Old Men. While No Country is packed with incident and an obvious choice for filmmakers , The Road relies heavily on its stark and finely weighted prose. To put it another way: not much happens, and what does happen is massively depressing.
So, it's a relief to report that director John Hillcoat hasn't sexed up the story, as early reports suggested. The Road is a thoughtful, earnest adaptation that does wonders with two actors (one of them a child) and minimal dialogue. Charlize Theron, who is billed as a co-star, actually appears only briefly in golden-hued flashbacks of life before the apocalypse.
Mortensen, one of those stars apparently immune to vanity, puts himself through the wringer for this difficult role, and perfectly captures the combination of bewildered hurt and fiery purpose that runs through the novel like a golden thread.
However, the real stars of the movie are Chris Kennedy and Javier Agguiresarobe, production designer and cinematographer respectively. Between them they have pulled off the near impossible, and brought McCarthy's brutally poetic landscape to life on the screen. The empty highways, the crumbling forests, the low rumble of a planet in its death throes... The Road looks and feels like the end of the world in a way that few films can manage.
Of course, for those of us who like our disasters burnished with CGI and dotted with familiar faces, The Road is a tough sell. But it is, in spite of everything, a hopeful and extremely moving film, that carries its ecological morality lightly and does no disgrace to its source material. Bring tissues. Recycled tissues.
The unfilmable made celluloid: a grim but powerful adaptation of a great novel.
> Posted by: Iconic Magazine
