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Joel & Ethan Coen's 2007 project, No Country for Old Man, was an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy, and earned an Academy Award for Best Picture. Prior to this, McCarthy's novels had been predominantly ignored by moviemakers, as his prose had been perceived as challenging to cinematically adapt. 2009's The Road is based on one of the author's most innately non-cinematic books. With this in mind, it's hard not to be impressed by the efforts of director John Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall in adapting the novel for the screen. Yet, while the film is impressive as a straight-up adaptation, everything from the novel seems translated in a workmanlike manner. The resulting motion picture is not awful per se, but it's more of a companion piece to McCarthy's book than an invigorating new take on the story. It's two hours of empty unpleasantness and atmosphere building, minus an emotional impact.
The movie takes place in a post-apocalyptic future, where an undefined catastrophe has occurred rendering the planet uninhabitable. Nothing can grow, wild life did not survive, and natural disasters such as earthquakes have destroyed the environmental balance. At the centre of The Road is two survivors: Father (Mortensen) and Son (Smit-McPhee), who have carried out the same lonely, aimless day-to-day routine of existence for years. Father and Son traverse the roads with only a vague goal in mind of reaching the coast and heading south in the hope of finding other people. There are dangers aplenty along the way, however, including disease, cannibalistic gangs, and, most pressingly, starvation.
As those who have read McCarthy's novel can attest to, this is a tough story about loss, death, and the fine line dividing man and animal. It raises interesting questions about if survival is truly desirable in such a harsh climate. Moreover, it erases action heroes from the post-apocalyptic equation to focus on a more unexciting tale. Translating this from book to screen would've posed a challenge, due to movie-goers being accustomed to seeing action-packed survival stories occurring within a post-apocalyptic environment (Mad Max and its sequels, for instance). Director John Hillcoat was an ideal choice to handle this material, as his last film The Proposition was tonally similar. From a visual standpoint, The Road is harrowing, with incredible shots of broken cities, blackened forests and wide expanses of dead country. The sky is grey & black, with the weather alternating between rainy and overcast. Colour is desaturated, with the sun only glimpsed in brief flashbacks. Indeed, The Road could have been filmed in black and white.
The problem is that the above plot synopsis is...literally it. This minuscule premise is not expanded upon in any interesting way, but rather unnecessarily stretched out to a gruelling two hours. It's a film built upon a non-existent story with no character arcs or true narrative beats, and with hardly any conflict. It's two hours of nothingness, with Hillcoat offering the viewer nothing to chew on but utter finality and nothing to indulge in but utter agony. Films and books are two completely different mediums, and a successful novel adaptation must be willing to deviate from the source material in inventive ways. It's not that The Road needed frequent action and testosterone; it just needed to be interesting and enthralling. 12 Angry Men (the 1957 original, of course) is a visually dull movie which takes place in a single room, yet it's riveting and well-written, with dynamite dialogue, rich characters and interesting arcs. Father and Son in The Road are boring, thinly-drawn figures, and the flashbacks to their former life are not enough to make the slog more tolerable. Sure, while you can admire what has been done here (and yes, I get what they were trying to do), at the end of the day it's like watching paint dry.
Even if what happens throughout the film is not especially interesting, Viggo Mortensen is usually compelling to watch in the lead role. Mortensen clearly threw himself into the character physically and mentally, as his performance is perpetually focused and the actor's body looks starved. The young Kodi Smit-McPhee, on the other hand, is never truly convincing - he merely hits the same shrill notes of naïveté over and over again, as well as asking frustrating questions. It's a poorly-written character brought to life in a soulless portrayal. Meanwhile, the supporting cast is filled with high-profile actors who receive little more than cameos: Charlize Theron as the Mother, Robert Duvall as an old man, and Guy Pearce who shows up at the end as a survivor who also wanders the desolate planet.
The Road looks good and has its moments, sure, yet it's just too agonising, depressing and difficult to sit through. It could have worked as a half-hour film, or a 10-minute short, but two full hours? It is not engaging or interesting enough to justify its runtime.
5.8/10
