Macall Polay

Visions Of Gehenna | Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee take the most downbeat hiking trip in human history in The Road.

THE ROAD
Directed by John Hillcoat. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall. Opens Fri, Nov 27.
***

Luke: The trailer for The Road gave me the sinking (and, as it turns out, inaccurate) sense that Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a father and son navigating a post-apocalyptic wasteland had been turned into the next Day After Tomorrow. Oddly, I ended up leaving the theatre complaining that the film was too faithful!

Clara: It is incredibly faithful. Of course, the book often reads like a screenplay, complete with stage directions. And as you suggested, the question becomes: is that a good thing? I’m inclined to say no. Books and films are very different animals, and in trying to remain close to the source material, the movie often comes across as something else entirely.

Luke: This is a great example of why bad books often make the best movies: folks aren’t so beholden to the text. McCarthy’s brilliant, sparse language both intensifies and offsets the book’s weighty content, while director John Hillcoat is left to transpose that same content into movie form with, basically, a series of overdone, bleak images. The depressing landscape is overpowering, and the story becomes much less effective when that’s what you primarily notice; in literary form, McCarthy’s words take centre stage instead.

Clara: Some movies are purely filmic, and couldn’t be expressed the same way in any other form, much like McCarthy’s words. If you tried to directly adapt, say, a Godard film into a novel, it’d probably be pretty stupid. You’d have to take, maybe, ideas and themes, and turn them into something based on the material, but which wouldn’t necessarily be identical or even recognizable. That’s what I think should have been done here, if anything.

Luke: And in a strange way, it seems that Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall recognize they’re trying to do something better suited to words: not content to recreate the novel’s action and dialogue, The Road includes Viggo Mortensen voiceovers that literally recite entire passages. When Mortensen narrates that he knows only that the child is his warrant, and that “if he is not the word of God, God never spoke,” it’s the sort of thing you might think sounded great if you read it on the page, but which just comes across as a heavy-handed explication of themes that the film itself fails to express.

Clara: And a film shouldn’t need words to express that. But on the other hand, you have McCarthy’s words to work with. So I can see the dilemma. Anyway, we’ve been critical so far, but I think there are a lot of very good elements to this film, albeit good parts of a whole that’s ultimately disappointing. The cinematography is quite accomplished, and there are particular images that they get just right, like the two protagonists sitting on a beach, looking at an endless grey ocean and wondering if another man and child are sitting on the other side.

Luke: For all the devastating photography, one of the most effective scenes for me is the one where father and son share an ancient can of Coca-Cola they’ve uncovered. While traditional apocalypse flicks like to focus on boisterous iconography (“You maniacs! You blew it up!”), I like that here, mankind’s greatest cultural artifact is a soft drink. It drives home the intimacy and ground-level nature of their struggle, while hinting at something more common and universal.

Clara: That scene also does a great job showing the unimaginable, unbridgeable gap between the man’s world and the boy’s world, which is one of my favourite thematic elements. To that effect, there’s a tiny later moment in which the boy, giving his dad some time alone in his childhood home, sits outside with a handful of crayons, just scrawling scribbly circles all over a page. Even the colours of the crayons are dreary — brown, grey, army green — and basically reflect the world we see around him. There are bigger scenes that should probably be discussed, like Mortensen’s revenge on a thief (The Wire’s Michael K. Williams) or the cannibals’ hellish den, but they’re just too overwhelmingly bleak. Honestly, stuff like that crayon moment was the saddest for me, but it’s a sadness you can engage with; it doesn’t just club you over the head with despair.

Luke: Thinking about it, there are quite a few solid scenes, but it’s hard to discuss the individual elements, because really there are probably more things I like (Robert Duvall) than things I don’t (Charlize Theron), but I’m just not sure I appreciate the overall effect. I don’t like to compare movies to books, but this one tried to be the book, and it failed to ignite the same intellectual stimulation or come together as a stylistic whole. It’s just sort of dreary.

Clara: I agree wholeheartedly that Duvall’s role is great. But I disagree that this movie is “sort of” dreary. It’s, like, the most mind-bogglingly bleak thing I’ve seen in a very
long time!