Movie Review - The Road

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Based on the Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Road is the story of an unnamed father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) traveling southbound in a post-apocalyptic world.  While the story’s background is futuristic and more akin to science-fiction, the story is a personal one; a father trying desperately to protect his son against the cruelty of a desolate and dying world.  The setting is bleak.  It is permanently winter and vegetation is largely dead.  The reason for the state of the world is never given (nuclear holocaust...global warming…Cub’s World Series victory?) but provisions are all but gone.  The few remaining survivors wander aimless scavenging for whatever scraps are left.  Any safety net provided by a civilized society has long since vanished.  There is no Red Cross or FEMA in this world.  Many have resorted to cannibalism.  It is in this environment that the father and son have embarked on a last ditch effort southward in the hopes of finding warming climates.

The film wisely provides little in the way of explanations.  Any indications as to what might have caused the cataclysm would only take away from the story at hand by injecting politics into the equation.  It’s not a story of how the world was destroyed, but the heights, lows and lengths to which mankind can go.  It’s a visually stunning film, all but devoid of color.  Instead, we are presented with a rich palette of grays.  If the film were to be described in one word, that word would be “relentless”: relentlessly depressing, relentlessly hopeless, relentlessly dreary. 

Mortensen gives a strong performance as father trying to protect his son from both the elements and the roving bands of cannibals sodimizing their way across the barren wasteland.  His son, who was born post-apocalypse, has not been made stronger by this world but weaker.  He’s slight and fragile.  Certainly he’s malnourished but he’s also psychologically wounded.  The trait is counterintuitive in that this is the only world he’s ever known.  Children are notorious adapters yet no reason is given for his lack of acclimation.  You’d think he’d be uniquely qualified to subsist in this world.

The film draws us into its world with smaller flourishes like the father attempting to maintain some semblance of normalcy by reading his son a bedtime story.  Or when the camera lingers on the boy staring at a mounted deer head just long enough for you to realize that it’s tantamount to you or me seeing our first unicorn.  These are nice moments but unfortunately there aren’t enough of them.  The film is remarkably faithful to the book but, without McCarthy’s lyrical prose to craft its narrative, it can’t quite land the body blow it’s so clearly aiming for.  For a film so unremittingly depressing, it paradoxically manages to keep us at arm’s length emotionally.  Scenes which should be heart wrenching never manage to muster the impact intended.  A film about such devastation should be more, well…devastating. 

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being Testament and 1 being The Postman, The Road gets a 7.

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