It’s a dusty, lonesome track

Cormac McCarthy is a pessimist.  As anyone who has seen the Coen Brothers’ brilliant adaptation of No Country For Old Men might infer, his stories abound with images of the worst that humanity is capable of.  Blood Meridian alone is enough to make one simply give up, depicting a man descending to the deepest depravity.  If one goes in for that sort of thing though then The Road is one of his best, its stark story of survival after some undefined apocalyptic event* told through simple and disciplined prose.

Director John Hillcoat brings to the adaptation much of the stark aesthetic that made The Proposition such a riveting watch, even re-enlisting Nick Cave and Warren Ellis to provide the soundtrack.  The cinematography is stunning: gnarled tree-skeletons grope at the sky while in the distance colossal wild-fires ravage the land, leaving it thickly choked with ash.  Hillcoat presents a world utterly destroyed, awe-inspiring in its sense of realism and permanence.

Through this landscape move a man (Viggo Mortensen) with his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee), bound to each other by the necessity of survival.  It is a world of stark moral choices, with no room for any shades of gray.  The man tells the boy that they are the good guys and tries to live up to the label, despite being haunted by memories of the past and of his wife (Charlize Theron).  In a world stalked by roving bands of cannibals** however, dwelling on the past is an unaffordable luxury.

The acting is uniformly excellent, Mortensen strong and controlled as ever, while Smit-McPhee manages to renew one's faith in the ability of child actors.  The supporting cast is just as good, Robert Duvall and Michael Kenneth Williams (Omar from The Wire) both turning in superb spains as desperate fellow-travellers.  Much of the dialogue has been imported verbatim from the novel, the characters confronting the landscape with terse, practical statements.

One false note is the inclusion of a clunky and unnecessary narration by Mortensen that weighs the film down by not simply allowing the viewer to mentally fill in the blanks***.  It’s as though there was some nervy producer in the background worrying about recouping the costs laid down for the FX, demanding that the whole thing be made as accessible as possible even if the effect is to diminish the film artistically.  Expect a director’s cut in a few years time.

Despite the sense that McCarthy has attempted to strip away all the noise of modern life to reveal something raw and essential about human nature, The Road is nonetheless a very American story.  The man is a classic rugged individualist, his journey one of following an ever-unfolding frontier, surviving on his own wits in a land bereft of community.  In some ways it is a US survivalists’ wet dream, the story indulging hungry yearnings for the end of the world by taking them seriously.

This leaves little room between a never-ending oscillation between determination and despair.  It's difficult not to see the conceit of this, as for all the striving to arrive at some hard truth it ultimately tells us nothing, moving beyond messy historical reality into a dark fantasy of meaninglessness in which people act without cause or effect or consequence.  For McCarthy the only way out of this nihilistic double-bind is by falling back on Christian faith, the boy assuming a Christ-like aura of divine innocence.

The flipside to this is the grim satisfaction the filmmaker’s take in depicting infanticide, sexual slavery and other abominations.  Although the most extreme excesses of McCarthy’s novel have been exorcised from the script – no doubt at the instigation of the aforementioned producer – there is nonetheless something gloating in the portrayal of the cannibals, the pleasure of seeing one’s worst fears confirmed.  Against this the film’s (and the book’s) hopeful ending feels somehow hollow, the reestablishment of some basic social order feeling inadequate against the horrors that precede it.  That all said it's a moving story, vividly realised for the screen.  In a month dominated by blue aliens and falling meatballs, you could do much, much worse.


Other things of interest: The Demon Duck of Doom; Charlie Brooker on form; the phrase 'Suck My Toe'.  Learn it.  Use it.


* Although hints are given that it wasn’t nuclear in nature, the precise cause of the calamity is never mentioned, McCarthy being less interested in cause and effect than in human response.

** I guess roving bands of vegetarians wouldn’t be quite as scary.

*** Think of the effect of the narration in the original release of Blade Runner and you’ve about got it.