The Road (2009)

(director: John Hillcoat; starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee)

The apocalyptic, end-of-all-humanity genre has been on fire so far this year, perhaps standing toe-to-toe with the other major, recent genre-craze, vampires. Look no further than 2012, Zombieland, 9, Terminator Salvation… even Pixar cashed in on it to some degree with last year’s Wall-E. A lot could be said about how, as we watch New York being obliterated by meteor strikes or whathaveyou, that it’s actually metaphor for the Wall Street financial collapse (9/11 references are so 2007). Regardless, these films all seem to speak directly to some latent personal guilt western society seems to have; that is, we do not expect our current decadent lifestyles to last to the end of our lifespan, at least not if the Chinese and other impoverished, developing nations on which whose shoulders we stand have anything to say about it. Perhaps this is also coupled with a secret longing to survive a zombie outbreak, as not only will we no longer be alienated from our productive capital (as Marx might phrase it), but all of us that have actually read the Zombie Survival Guide will finally be a helluva lot more socially useful than we are in the current society. While I’ve yet to find the genre equivalent to Let the Right One In, so far one of the better attempts has been John Hillcoat’s The Road, adapted from the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name. Not that that’s saying much.

I was relieved to see that this material had not been mined for another stalker thriller movie as the first trailer had suggested, although in a way the opposite problem is nearly the case. The two leads (Viggo Mortensen and newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee) walk from location to location, encountering individual scenes from the book before moving on without seeming to have learned much from them. Not that such a minimalist style is bad in and of itself (I’m the guy who loved Gerry) but the problem is director John Hillcoat takes such a straightforward approach; sequences are shot and edited just like they could be found in any other more eventful film, and while the story emphasis is always first and foremost on character (the events that caused this particular doomsday are never shown or even alluded to, a welcome reversal from every other disaster movie where the actors are just used as a point of reference to estimate the size of that CGI tidalwave) I never felt like I got to really understand them, at least in the way that I’m sure McCarthy would have had. There is the whole existential motif of “finding humanity through common acts of decency even in the hopeless face of utter disaster” that many viewers will probably find significant meaning in, but it’s becoming a bit overused and even at times can read as cliché; it was even markedly present in last years’ surprisingly decent Cloverfield.

Still, it’s hard not to be affected by Mortensen and McPhee’s worn, weathered faces and the dark, bleak surroundings; the set design and cinematography are truly impressive, although the extravagant use of only grays and browns within the mise-en-scène’s color palate can almost become too overbearing after an hour or so of extended viewing; if Hillcoat and his editor really wanted to be dicks they probably could burn everyone’s retinas by suddenly cutting to a bright, sunshiny image at the end (which thankfully only happens in metaphor). By the way, since most people who might read this are probably also coaster enthusiasts, Conneaut Lake Park makes an appearance about ¾ of the way into the movie, the fire that destroyed the ballroom and neighboring midway nearly two years ago a nice presence in the film. Blue Streak (or any other of the park’s rides for that matter) are absent, but there is a shot of the entry sign identifying it as such, which is kind of odd since anyone who would get anything out of that sign would probably know it’s located in Pennsylvania, even though the characters are supposed to be in North Carolina along the coast at that time.

(reviewed 11/28/09)

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