The Road (2010)
Viggo Mortensen walks across a dead America in Proposition director John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic fable
We began watching the end of the world 50 years ago but in the first decade of the twenty-first century filmmaker's apocalyptic fantasies were overtaken by media-mediated fear. Movies magnified the scale of the terror and the destructive spectacle, but with 9/11, climate change, global recession and untreatable pandemics stoking our pre-heated millenarian anxiety, the real world was ahead of the curve: the bad stuff was already out there.
I Am Legend and 28 Days Later were thrilling examples of existential exploitica, but viral mutation and hungry post-humans were minor intimations of the horror ahead. John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel 'The Road' starts at the end of the line and then sinks through several new circles of hell. It isn't designed, as apocalyptic art often is, to prompt a rapturous response to the awful truth or to signal to audiences that we've picked the right side in a Manichean brawl. The Road has no conventional politics. It's a fable stripped almost entirely of hope. Hillcoat follows McCarthy's godforsaken vision to create a relentless, colourless, dirge of a film that goes nowhere and doesn't come back. The single chink of light in a story from which even the sun has been banished: The Road is a brutally intense account of the will to survive in a world where survival is the least preferable option of all.
It begins with the arrival of an undisclosed cataclysm and the unseen onset of anarchy. The clocks stop at 1.17 and for Viggo Mortensen and his pregnant wife (names have ceased to matter) it really is the end of time. "Within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting," runs Mortensen's dream-like opening narration. "The screams of the murdered... the dead impaled on spikes along the road... Cannibalism, that was the great fear."
Eight years on from the end and Mortensen's wife (Charlize Theron) has committed suicide leaving father and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) to walk, without clear purpose, towards the south of the country and the sea. Hillcoat drops in a couple of flashbacks to the aftermath of the disaster, but the sense is merely of stepping out of one nightmare and into another. "Other families are doing it," says Theron, fingering the revolver that will eventually help her out.
McCarthy's prose is probably untranslatable into any other medium. 'The Road' is a testament to the transformative power of the word. But Hillcoat's film captures the novel's eerie despair and the sense of a world in which meaning must be recreated, now that everything meaningful has gone. British nuclear attack drama Threads from 1984 (when else?) imagined the end of the future in similarly unstinting fashion, and, like that film, The Road is barely shot in colour at all. An ashen-pall hangs over a wretched landscape from which all animals and plant life has gone. Those human survivors that remain have been reduced to atavistic scavengers - or worse. As father and son starve in the freezing filth, the sense of physical discomfort is palpable. Like Hillcoat's The Proposition, The Road presents its characters with a physical as well as an emotional challenge: how much more can they bear? This is humankind returned to a state of nature and the two bullets left in Mortensen's pistol represent a final insurance policy. One's for him when he can't take anymore. The other is for his son.
Appropriately, given that this is world from which everything has gone, there's nothing in The Road that doesn't need to be. The past is immaterial. The future is forgotten. Father and son are trapped in an endless, hellish present in which the only variation is the level of direct threat. Mostly this comes in the form of raiding cannibals who've survived according to some appalling new code of their own. The ruined infrastructure of the old world - derelict cities, broken buildings, bedrooms thick with the dust of the disintegrating dead - is an astonishing piece of design and the only discordant note, unexpectedly given those responsible, is Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' score, which declaims when it needed only to whisper - if indeed, it should have been there at all.
So much unrelenting grimness begs the question - why do you need to see this at all? The answer, perversely, lies in The Road's unshakeable humanity, and it's faith in the unconditional love that binds father and son to the end. "Do you carry the fire?" asks the boy when it looks as if the final spark has gone out. "Yes," comes the answer from a ragged stranger, though he has no idea what the kid means. It's a moment of quiet yet blinding power in a film which looks unimaginable horror in the eye, blinks, and then just carries on looking.
This review originally appeared at Film4.com
I Am Legend and 28 Days Later were thrilling examples of existential exploitica, but viral mutation and hungry post-humans were minor intimations of the horror ahead. John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel 'The Road' starts at the end of the line and then sinks through several new circles of hell. It isn't designed, as apocalyptic art often is, to prompt a rapturous response to the awful truth or to signal to audiences that we've picked the right side in a Manichean brawl. The Road has no conventional politics. It's a fable stripped almost entirely of hope. Hillcoat follows McCarthy's godforsaken vision to create a relentless, colourless, dirge of a film that goes nowhere and doesn't come back. The single chink of light in a story from which even the sun has been banished: The Road is a brutally intense account of the will to survive in a world where survival is the least preferable option of all.
It begins with the arrival of an undisclosed cataclysm and the unseen onset of anarchy. The clocks stop at 1.17 and for Viggo Mortensen and his pregnant wife (names have ceased to matter) it really is the end of time. "Within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting," runs Mortensen's dream-like opening narration. "The screams of the murdered... the dead impaled on spikes along the road... Cannibalism, that was the great fear."
Eight years on from the end and Mortensen's wife (Charlize Theron) has committed suicide leaving father and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) to walk, without clear purpose, towards the south of the country and the sea. Hillcoat drops in a couple of flashbacks to the aftermath of the disaster, but the sense is merely of stepping out of one nightmare and into another. "Other families are doing it," says Theron, fingering the revolver that will eventually help her out.
McCarthy's prose is probably untranslatable into any other medium. 'The Road' is a testament to the transformative power of the word. But Hillcoat's film captures the novel's eerie despair and the sense of a world in which meaning must be recreated, now that everything meaningful has gone. British nuclear attack drama Threads from 1984 (when else?) imagined the end of the future in similarly unstinting fashion, and, like that film, The Road is barely shot in colour at all. An ashen-pall hangs over a wretched landscape from which all animals and plant life has gone. Those human survivors that remain have been reduced to atavistic scavengers - or worse. As father and son starve in the freezing filth, the sense of physical discomfort is palpable. Like Hillcoat's The Proposition, The Road presents its characters with a physical as well as an emotional challenge: how much more can they bear? This is humankind returned to a state of nature and the two bullets left in Mortensen's pistol represent a final insurance policy. One's for him when he can't take anymore. The other is for his son.
Appropriately, given that this is world from which everything has gone, there's nothing in The Road that doesn't need to be. The past is immaterial. The future is forgotten. Father and son are trapped in an endless, hellish present in which the only variation is the level of direct threat. Mostly this comes in the form of raiding cannibals who've survived according to some appalling new code of their own. The ruined infrastructure of the old world - derelict cities, broken buildings, bedrooms thick with the dust of the disintegrating dead - is an astonishing piece of design and the only discordant note, unexpectedly given those responsible, is Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' score, which declaims when it needed only to whisper - if indeed, it should have been there at all.
So much unrelenting grimness begs the question - why do you need to see this at all? The answer, perversely, lies in The Road's unshakeable humanity, and it's faith in the unconditional love that binds father and son to the end. "Do you carry the fire?" asks the boy when it looks as if the final spark has gone out. "Yes," comes the answer from a ragged stranger, though he has no idea what the kid means. It's a moment of quiet yet blinding power in a film which looks unimaginable horror in the eye, blinks, and then just carries on looking.
This review originally appeared at Film4.com