By contrast, The Road -- ostensibly another film-worthy project, given its story of a father and son struggling for survival in a post-apocalyptic landscape -- relies almost entirely on the asynchronous beauty of its language. It's a rarer thing, more delicate and indefinable, with only a thin reed of a story.
An allegorical horror film that mostly withholds the thrilling build and release of tension, The Road focuses on a sickly man and his young son (both dangerously underfed) struggling down a road, making vaguely for the coast. The landscape (for the most part blessedly free of CGI trickery) is one of uniform desolation, shattered suburbs and sodden forests, coatings of ash everywhere and sinister, near-constant rumbles in the distance. On their journey, the two try and avoid any other survivors, as many of the few still around -- with most all food supplies long looted, and both flora and fauna apparently extinct -- have resorted to cannibalism.
As the unnamed father, Viggo Mortensen wears the weight of a thousand years on his eyelids. In aching flashbacks to before the unnamed calamity (described only as 'a shearing of light'), we see him as a trim and reasoned man, somebody equally at home in a workshop as in a library. We see his wife (Charlize Theron, doing some bruising work here) in golden domestic glow -- one particularly striking shot frames her dozing on a sun-dappled lawn almost as a still life -- before the only hinted-at descent into anarchy that robs her of any will to live even after her son is born.
In most post-apocalyptic stories, the emphasis is on the method of survival, how to bar the doors against marauding mutants and such. Whether or not to even bother surviving doesn't come up. That question, however, lies at the heart of The Road, which -- even without McCarthy's stony and Biblical descriptions of a world gone to dust -- posits a world as unremittingly bleak as any that has been filmed before. When the man and boy (played with unusually affecting vulnerability by Kodi Smit-McPhee) enter a barn and find three people hanging dead from a beam, the boy asks why they killed themselves. 'You know why,' is the only response he gets.
This would all be unbearable were it not for the fact that The Road, for all its end-of-the-world trappings, is really about the devastating love the man feels for his son. Amidst this world's grey and savage hopelessness, the man clings to his son as a totem of humanity, of what was lost. Even as the man berates his son for wanting to help every stranger they come across, he knows that the boy's dangerously generous nature makes him the better man, and something worth protecting at all costs. There is a moral imperative at work here which is uncommon for the post-apocalyptic film. The man and boy are no different from the enslaving, head-on-a-pike savages they come across. No virus sets them apart -- only the moral choice not to follow that particular road.
Whether by choice or studio coercion, Hillcoat, whose previous film The Proposition was a veritable circus of muddy and bloody overkill, surprisingly turns the film's attention away from some of the book's more graphic scenes, keeping it from turning into a carnival of horrors. Despite smart choices like this, and the leads' bracing performances, the film still stutters a bit as it nears the end. Too many of its later episodes are strung together one after the other like beads on a chain, reinforcing the same point (even if they do feature quality work from Robert Duvall and Michael K. Williams). And while Penhall's screenplay can't quite capture the blunt poetry of McCarthy's dialogue, this imperfect film ultimately delivers the original's saddened forcefulness with a brave and near-remarkable conviction.
