The Road

Cormac McCarthy's bleak and beautiful novel The Road has finally completed its long journey to the big screen, but while the movie version walks and talks like its literary predecessor, it fails to evoke the profoundly poetic tone that makes McCarthy's post-apocalyptic tale such a wonder to behold. The finished product feels slavishly devoted to the impressive source material, but the dramatic core is hopelessly artificial. This is standard, clumsy literary adaptation in a situation that required a deft touch.

Sticking to nearly the exact narrative path of McCarthy's book, The Road follows a loving father (Viggo Mortensen) and his sweetly innocent son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as they bravely traverse a barren wasteland that was once the United States of America. There is nothing resembling a functioning country anymore, each recognizable image of modern civilization left decaying in the midst of a tortured landscape.

There are houses, abandoned cars, and of course, long, winding roads, but man-made structures such as gas stations and shopping centres dejectedly slouch like unwanted relics from some forgotten time. The world, as we know it, has ended and only a handful of scattered survivors remain, some holding on to old-world ideals, while others have turned their backs on morality and turned to vicious cannibalism to stay alive.

Boiling down the human condition to such harrowing extremes is certainly interesting (it worked exceptionally well in McCarthy's book), but director John Hillcoat fails to make the cannibalistic villains a truly palpable threat. They drive around in a beastly vehicle (the only operational thing still guzzling gas on the road, apparently) and brandish big guns while searching for tasty new victims. One of the few bad guys to actually utter a few lines even speaks in a hillbilly drawl, as if he's auditioning for a post-apocalyptic version of Deliverance.

There is nothing frightening or even unnerving about these people, which makes it especially hard to fear them. Since they are the only bad guys wandering the wasteland and their antagonistic role requires them to cause great amounts of stress for our unnamed protagonists, it is especially frustrating that they are so poorly handled by Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall. McCarthy's book succeeds at creating a sense of danger at every turn. Hillcoat's movie fails at supplying any dramatic urgency to the conflict.

By loosening the grip that the villains have on this decrepit world, Hillcoat has trouble balancing the considerable highs and lows experienced by father and son throughout the journey. The movie version of this father and son tale trudges along in such simplistically straightforward fashion that the emotional elements of the story quickly fade into the background. This cinematic Road trip is a dramatic flat line, which directly contradicts the hefty heart that beats so loudly in McCarthy's novel.

Despite the movie's crushing flaws, there are still a few reasons to commend this noble attempt at adaptation. Committing McCarthy's gruffly poetic prose to celluloid is no easy task and Hillcoat at least manages to capture visually arresting moments that remain faithful to the book's uniquely described imagery. Cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe bathes the post-apocalyptic landscape in chilly greys and muddy browns, lending the movie a visual style that is as bleak as the subject matter.

Mortensen's performance is solid and Smit-McPhee turns in an acceptable portrayal of a boy forced to grow up in a hopeless world. The pair share almost all of their scenes together and they occupy the vast majority of narrative space, which results in both actors rarely exiting the frame. There is little room for other actors to make much of an impression and the supporting cast is uncomfortably spotty at best.

Robert Duvall is very good as an aging survivor who refuses to give up, but Charlize Theron is awkwardly unconvincing as the absent wife and mother to the movie's protagonists. Theron's character appears in a long series of unnecessary flashbacks that mark one of the only significant deviations from McCarthy's narrative path. In the book, the wife and mother is a ghostly apparition who is fleetingly referenced in a mysterious fashion. In the movie, she appears numerous times in a weak collection of scenes that provide heavy-handed exposition in place of meaningful dramatic context.

Hillcoat and Penhall have tried very hard to adapt McCarthy's novel for the big screen as faithfully as possible. This Road is clearly paved with good intentions, but the finished product is an emotionally underwhelming endeavour. The story is mostly intact and the post-apocalyptic world looks sufficiently grimy and grey, but the poetic soul of McCarthy's novel has been lost in translation. Drained of dramatic intensity and emotional impact, Hillcoat's Road movie is an empty shell that transforms a thematically potent apocalypse into a woefully forgettable exercise in unimaginative literary adaptation.