Rating: 3/5
Verdict: An endurance test, unless you like zombie movies.
The film of Cormac McCarthy's howlingly bleak apocalyptic novel is, first and foremost, a triumph of location scouting (the process by which film-makers find where they are going to set their shoot). Disused road tunnels and abandoned quarries throughout the economically depressed northeast perfectly evoke the dystopian landscapes required by the story. And cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe (a frequent collaborator with Almodovar, he also shot the Nicole Kidman ghost story The Others) cranks up the effect with filters that chill the film's world with a bluish monochrome. It is, if nothing else, a visually impressive work.
The story is of a father and son (Mortensen and the luminous Australian youngster Smit-McPhee) who walk the landscapes ruined by an unspecified catastrophe - we know only that it involved fire and that, like doomsday, it was not unexpected - keeping one step ahead of marauding bands who aren't choosy about what or who they eat.
The nameless characters are heading, for reasons also unexplained, for the coast and the father comforts his son with the constant reminder that the pair are "carrying the fire". It is in this phrase - and in the boy's need for its repetition - that both film and book locate their central idea. Well-meaning but literal-minded environmentalists who claim this film as a warning about climate change miss the point: it's a quasi-Biblical meditation on whether human kindness and goodness can endure in a battle for survival, and whether good men remain good if they commit bad acts to triumph over evil.
That idea seeps from round the edges of McCarthy's novel, even though it's a deeply oppressive piece of writing, a sonata of a single note. But it struggles to surface in the film. Hillcoat, an Australian who made the excellent outback Western The Proposition, is very faithful to McCarthy's narrative (although jarring flashbacks reincarnate the mother (Theron), who existed only in the man's imagination in the book). But scene piles on scene without any dramatic modulation, and any allegorical intent drowns in production design - which is another way of saying the story is swamped by the telling of it. Unlike the deeply humane and thought-provoking Children of Men, for example, The Road never seems to be about anything, so it becomes something of an endurance test, unless you like zombie movies.
The technical skill on display is extraordinary: the scene in which a cellar full of people being held as fresh meat is a nightmare vision worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. But the film never touches the heart.
Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Kodi Smit-McPhee
Director: John Hillcoat
Running time: 112 mins
Rating: R16 (violence and content that may disturb)
