Movie summary of The Road by Michael the Moviegoer.
THE ROAD = ***1/2
“Poetry In A Post-Apocalyptic World”
Cormac McCarthy’s award-winning novel “The Road” was considered by many in Hollywood to be unfilmable. As someone who has never read the novel, I’m happy to report that after seeing the film version, directed by John Hillcoat and adapted by Joe Penhall, it’s hard to imagine how this movie can work as a book!
It’s a simple story of a father and his young son trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world into which the boy was born. Viggo Mortensen plays the boy’s father in a career-defining performance. Charlize Theron is the boy’s mother who is shown in flashbacks but who abandoned them and is presumed dead.
Together father and son are on a journey to find the sea. They must navigate through an ash-filled cold gray world in which most humans have resorted to cannibalism to survive. Along the way, they meet and help an old wise man played by an almost unrecognizable Robert Duvall. Only Duvall can take a small cameo appearance and turn it into an Oscar contender of a supporting performance! In a career full of iconic performances, this is yet another Duvall will be remembered for.
McCarthy (who also wrote the Oscar-winning “No Country For Old Men”) wisely avoids politics and focuses only on the relationship between his characters and how they must adapt and interact with their strange new environment. How our world came to this doesn’t seem to interest McCarthy. The devastation could be from a nuclear war or from a comet hitting the Earth. The hows and whys are irrelevant. Survival is all that matters here.
“The Road” is bleak. But there’s a kind of visual poetry to this bleakness that makes it strangely beautiful. There are images that will haunt you long after the film is over. No doubt marketing this film will be a challenge. Even the title is bleak, boring and non-descript. But at least it’s marginally better than if the film were called “The Boy” or “The Tree”.
DVD Double Feature: Few films deal with the aftermath of an apocalyptic event without resorting to overblown cartoonish action-film cliches involving bikers and truckers. “The Road” wisely focuses on the drama of the situation and realistically portrays how humans will try to survive and move on. The last film I can remember doing this was 1983’s “Testament”. Jane Alexander earned an Oscar nomination as the mother of two boys trying to survive the aftermath of a nuclear blast that abruptly cuts off their middle-American suburban town from all communication with the outside world, which is probably completely destroyed.
Michael The Moviegoer
