THE ROAD is long, hard, leads nowhere

As if Avatar‘s Box Office haul wasn’t evidence enough, here we have another fine specimen to file under the already expansive exhibition ”Reasons People Are Shit.” But thankfully, The Road joins these ranks deliberately, in thematic content and not by cultural reception. The Road is a bold move into relatively uncharted territory for Hollywood. People seem only to want bright, shiny, optimistic visions of the future (Star Trek, Transformers, GI Joe, etc), especially in these financially difficult times; people want hope and moral fortitude. What people don’t want is The Road, a spartan, morally ambiguous tale of a desperate father and his hopeless son wandering through the desolate wastelands that await us on the other side of the apocalypse – but The Road is what we have. So how is it?

The film worships realism to a fault. “Realism” in the sense that everyone’s teeth are crappy, everyone’s got long hair and beards, nobody smiles or says “hello,” and bullets actually kill people. So far so good. But the film falters in its failure to address realistically the scenario we find our protagonists in. Before you all start screeching about how “less is more,” let me point out that this was a purely personal concern. You might not be bothered by it, but it certainly bothered me that we aren’t given quite enough facts to fully suspend my own personal disbelief. The apocalypse is dealt with off-screen, causing it to take on a mythic, invisible property that will completely fail to satisfy some audiences (especially the type of people who like to see shit blow up good). I’m sure the bulk of post-apocalyptic survivors wouldn’t understand what had happened or why, but they’d at least see the fires coming or the asteroid falling or the gods smiting or whatever the hell happened. It might be realistic to keep the audience in the dark, but it’s also a bit dismissive. Because of this deliberate thrift with facts, I was left in the unfortunate position of not understanding the main characters’ motivations.

Viggo Mortensen’s Father character is determined to follow the freeway south, to the coast. Why? Not our business, apparently. Might there be boats there? Unaffected settlements? Could it be possible to construct a raft and sail to another country or island where cannibals aren’t intent on raping and eating anything they can get there hands on? Is the whole world up the creek without a canoe, or is it just America, as per usual? These are the kinds of things I wanted answered. But whenever the child asks why they’re going to the coast, Father grunts something along the lines of “just because,” which every child knows is the cheapest argument a parent can stoop to. But it gets worse — every time Boy asks a question to do with anything important (such as “why don’t we eat people?” “why are we the good guys?” or ”why can’t we just die and be with mother?”) Father grunts “just because.” It’s like being beaten over the head with a rock whenever you ask a question — and it gets old quickly. For a movie that dabbles in moral ambiguity, having this frustratingly opaque main character lets down some of the tension and atmosphere.

That said, Mortensen’s performance is predictably amazing. You absolutely believe he’s in this situation — even if you’re never told what the situation is — and every painful memory, every regret, and every desperate step down the road rings absolutely true on the silver screen. Father’s bond with Boy is also well-developed. Mortensen and relatively newish kid Kodi Smit-McPhee share a palpable connection, and it helps to sell their relationship. There is a pleasant push-pull dynamic to their conversations that helps to set up the Father as an uncompromising man consumed with the need to give his son a future, and the Boy as an inherently optimistic kid who sometimes has to make tough, adult decisions. The chemistry between the two leads is good, which is lucky, because the film would totally fail without it. Smit-McPhee miraculously holds his own against the seasoned Mortensen, and it’ll be interesting see where he goes after this film.

And now to the much-discussed dark tone of the film. The survivors of whatever holocaust decimated our poor planet have turned on each other in their desperation to survive, leading to some nasty encounters with equally nasty individuals. The people in this movie are all so shit — so very, very shit — that it’s a wonder Father and Boy don’t just quit while they’re ahead. At one point Boy even asks (indirectly) Father why they keep on keeping on, and Father predictably grunts his “just because” mantra. I know the point of the movie is to avoid cliche heroism in the pursuit of realism, but I think the audience deserves a little more motivation besides “because I said so,” especially when the bulk of the audience is probably entirely unsure what they would do were they in this horrible situation. We need something to latch onto, and the script (apparently quite faithful to the novel) doesn’t give us what we crave. If I were going to push the brutal tragedy of the film, I’d have the Boy finally manage to convince the Father to break his code of determination at some point in the third act, and help some of the helpless people they come across, and then have the Father brutally punished for trying to be the traditional “good guy”. That might be a more compelling interpretation of morality, but what we get in The Road is a little too dry and opaque for my tastes.

Some of the images of human suffering in The Road are certainly harrowing, but the human cruelty behind the images is merely implied, never explored in a meaningful way.  This is almost certainly a good thing, or else audiences would go absolutely bananas with terror (it’s amazing how scared we are of ourselves, of what we’re capable of), but I can’t help but wish the filmmakers had pushed this controversial material a bit deeper than the emotionless trolling they seemed to be aiming for. The harder the task, the sweeter the reward, after all, and Father and Boy seem to get away scott-free with little moral opposition in most cases.

This segues into another point. In some of the more tense scenes, the protagonists seem to escape from certain death only through the deus ex machina of a fade-to-black or jump in time. One example sees the pair hunted all day and into the night by torch-wielding cannibals. Father and son are surrounded by the hunters, but they can’t go on. They pick a hiding spot and wait, still surrounded, in mortal peril, and then – BAM – cut to the morning after, when the hunters have given up and gone away. It must have been incredibly difficult to resolve these sorts of situation without resorting to “they suddenly come across a working vehicle” or “Father miraculously finds a stack of ammunition and kills everyone,” but you’d think the filmmakers wouldn’t bury their protagonists quite so deep in shit if they couldn’t think of a good way to get them out again.

Another thing that irked me were the flashbacks. I think they might have been devised in some misguided attempt to fill in some background details and give the Father some more motivation, but they are too frequent and repetitious to be compelling or engaging. Charlize Theron plays the Mother in these flashbacks, a total downer, whose only wish is to kill herself and her son. Great. I’d rather stick with these guys on the road, thanks. Every scene with her in it had me rolling my eyes and tapping my toe in anticipation of when the real plot would recommence, which is probably not the reaction Hillcoat and co. were going for.

The cinematography is suitably bleak. It’s serviceable but deliberately unappealing, so there’s not much more to be said about it. The musical score is manipulative, cheap and pretentious, and therefore quite unnecessary. Sombre piano tinklings are not ominous or inspirational, they’re just wanky, so cut that out. Oh, and Father’s voiceover is pretty unnecessary too. It doesn’t show up frequently enough to become part of the film, and what little of interest he does say could be conveyed in conventional scenes, none of this flashback / voiceover nonsense. Otherwise the film is technically sound, and the deliberate (read: snail’s) pace is a breath of fresh air in modern Hollywood.

For all these apparently disparaging comments I have for The Road, it does have its strengths. Whether or not they outweigh the weaknesses is up to personal choice, but I actually found this brutal “what if” tale watchable, compelling and even a little bit sad. The film is cut well enough that the ebbs and flows of tension, desperation and pathos are neat, tidy and effective, and the concept is unique enough to cinema to be fresh and engaging. The performances are fine, the script is solid, it’s just a shame there isn’t a little bit more detail and a little bit more humanity in the film. It feels like The Road sets out to ask some hard questions, to probe and challenge the viewer, but in the end it doesn’t quite reach its goal, and, even worse for people who like immediate rewards, it fails to provide any satisfying answers to the vague challenges it proposes. Check it out if you enjoy real science fiction, great acting, or unique cinematic experiences. Avoid it if you only like giant robots, explosions, and naked women.

The Road score

63/100

As an aside, this poster is full of lies. Robert Duvall and Charlize Theron are barely in this movie; Father and Boy aren’t constantly outrunning a wall of flames; and that moment in which the world changes forever (implied here to be the most important thing about the film) is never actually shown. Plus that slanty, heroic-pose bullshit? Completely at odds with the ethic of the film. Sorry, couldn’t resist.