Film Review: The Road
The Road (2008)
Directed by: John Hillcoat
Review by: Dustin Hall
“Take the gun. Take it and keep it with you, don’t let anybody take it from you. You don’t know what’s coming down the road.”
I just had the pleasure of seeing The Road, based on the novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men). Is it a horror movie? Its distributor and most critics have it classified as a ‘Drama’. That seems to be the way Hollywood goes, though. If it’s harrowing, but of a certain cinematic quality, it’s a Drama. If the terror is a bit on the schlocky side, then it’s a Horror. Forever, horror seems to be relegated to a certain clique of crude clichés.
Yet, The Road seemed right at home in the Horror genre to me, and so I had to set a review of it down here. After all, looking at the contents of the film, I can think of little more horrific.
Another blogger put down a short review of the film, and as a very concise summary, I think that it works. The words of IMDB’s Talkinhorse, “You can say that Chigurh of ‘No Country’ represented an evil akin to the cannibals of The Road. But there were differences. Chigurh had a certain weird honor to his behavior. In that sense, he was the sort of evil we can sink our teeth into; a formidable adversary. The cannibals of The Road were merely depraved and debased animals rather than evil human beings. And that’s a model that repulses me. I might say that The Road represents my worst fear: That we’re not standing against the devil; that we’re not standing against anything, because there is nothing to stand against.” Perfect. And it should be noted that this particular poster hated the movie. And its particularly bleak outlook on the world had a few people in my own screening walking out.
The Road is the story of the end of man, essentially. An undefined disaster has struck Earth, and the planet is dying. It is never made clear if the cause is a nuclear holocaust or a fallen meteor, but the dust shot upwards has blackened the sky, killed all of the foliage, and all of the animal life. Only a few pockets of humans remain. About this time, a child was born: The Child, as played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, son of The Man, Viggo Mortensen. The movie takes place six to ten years later, and all the canned food is gone, shoes are rare and valuable commodities, and storms of snow and ash continually pour down, pulling dead trees from the soil. The Earth is a dead husk, no longer providing for the last vestiges of man, and what few humans there are turn to rape, murder, and cannibalism in their last days. This is the world The Man and Child walk through.
These two unnamed travelers head South, heading towards the coast, finally driven away from their mid-western home by the increasingly brutal cold climate. The Road follows the two on the journey, dodging small tribes of cannibals and bandits, unsure if anyone is worth trusting, or if the world will ever provide for them again. They keep walking, hoping that in the South there might be warmth, shelter, and perhaps a few good people. They carry the fire within them.
As a fan of the novel, it’s hard to not compare the two and take the film for its own merits. The film – though it does have some additions and subtractions – does seem to keep the main idea. Don’t think that the story’s focus is really the apocalypse. This stark reality is no more the focus than the drug money is in No Country For Old Men: it is merely the catalyst that sets events in motion – events that examine the relationship between a father and son in a terminal world. A terminal world where God does not exist, and there is no reward but another day left for mankind to look forward to.
And really, this barren landscape is, by McCarthy’s philosophy, what we face every day, here just thrust in the viewer’s face so it cannot be ignored. At some point, every man dies, every son loses his mother and father. Eventually, all of humanity will be dust and all of our accomplishments gone; depending on your outlook, this could be in a hundred years or a billion, but eventually the Earth will die. And really, society is a veneer of pleasures we have used to keep our keenly savage edge’s blunted. When it comes to power, and comfort, and even simple survival, the animal side of humanity bears its teeth. With these ideas in mind, why do we keep going? Why do we keep moving? The Road asks that of its viewers as well as its characters, with the film adding the extra step of visualizing The Man’s memories of the warm, sunny world of the past with the endless gray of the now. Charlize Theron’s extended role, via flashback, adds a palpable visual sensuality that haunts The Man’s mind. He and his child keep moving because they believe they carry the spark of humanity, that part of ourselves that makes us good. Even if there is no tomorrow, The Man believes that his child houses in his innocence all that was good in mankind. The boy must survive so that when he – all of the rest of humanity burned out before him – ultimately dies, it can be said that the last man was a good one, a positive end-note.
Though toned down ever so slightly from the book, The Road’s most grisly moments still hold their visceral edge. Moments where the father and son are stalked by cannibals, the boy in tears, and the father holding a pistol to his own son’s head, prepared to do the unthinkable should they be caught… the adrenaline rushes and you can feel the despair in the pit of your stomach.
The film is bleak. Far too bleak for most. But it is a testament to The Road’s quality that it can instill such emotion into its audience. The film is not perfect – a few bits of poor cutting and a couple of strange adaptation choices from the source material – but generally the power is there.
Though imperfect, The Road is captivating, pushed ever onward by its unrelenting script, and excellent performances all around. Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron both make excellent parents to the exceptional child actor Kodi Smit-McPhee, himself bearing a striking resemblance to Theron. The most stand-out performance has to be that of Robert Duvall, who completely disappears into the old man Eli, a short but unforgettable role.
In the end, this is a thinking man’s horror film. You can’t go in expecting jump scares or mindless entertainment. In fact, don’t go in expecting entertainment at all. The Road is NOT a fun film. It’s a film about man trying to find its best in the face of its worst, and often failing. If you appreciate the artistry of terror, and are compelled by frightening ideas more than just blood and guts, then it’s a film for you. I know the rest of my film-goers were disturbed for hours afterward, lost in deep and morbid thought. Surely, that is the mark of quality Horror.
