On The Road
Published 19 months ago
The film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road paints a bleak and believable vision of a terrifying future
Cormac McCarthy has secured a reputation as one of America’s great novelists, and his 2006 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road has become a staple of millions of bookshelves. Tonight John Hillcoat's adaptation hits the big screen (as if you didn't already know). So much has been said about The Road that we imagine you know it explores the journey of one man and his son across a post-apocalyptic American wasteland stalked by cannibals and rapists. All Man (Viggo Mortensen) can do in this violent, hopeless environment is protect Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as best he can, and prepare him for the inevitability of death. The word ‘bleak’ has been repeatedly used to describe this film, and it certainly features some of the worse aspects of human nature, but the core of the story – how Man prepares Boy for when he will no longer be around – is heart-warming and one as old as time. In fact The Road, can be seen as a metaphor for the common journey towards death we all share, and perhaps therein lies it's power. "I think our interest in apocalypse is very simply a projection of our own fear of death," says Hillcoat. "The fear of not being around anymore and leaving your children behind."
The creeping apocalyptic horror that permeates every second is punctuated with flashbacks to a time only slightly less awful when The Mother (Chalize Theron) was still alive. Although her part in the film is small she is in a sense always with Man and Boy (there are only two remaining bullets in the gun they carry with them, as she took the third not wanting to live in a land without hope). And the searing performances from all three make the film. "Because of this movie I’ve ended up thinking always about no green, no sun, no anything…" says Mortensen of the project. "For the first time in my life I’ve denied the coming of spring and I have denied life in a way."
Hillcoat creates the ideal backdrop for these great performances – huge destroyed and deserted bridges over bottomless ravines and upturned tankers in waterless rivers. “What was great about the book was that indescribable, visceral reality to it… We immediately thought this story seems to tap into experiences of natural disasters and manmade disasters – so why not utilise all of that?” Partly filmed in Katrina-ravaged New Orleans, the landscape is almost like another member of the cast in The Road, framing the quest of the main characters to reach the coast perfectly. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis provide the eerie score – an appropriately sparse avant-garde work that complements both the stark deathscape and the story. “The music was composed as a direct response to the film," says Cave. "A light, haunting, simple score with a sense of absence and loss at its heart.” Dark, powerful, bleak, questioning, haunting and profoundly moving, The Road provides a canvas into which we can all project our greatest fears and it dives fearlessly into the deepest waters of the human spirit. It's worth testing the water if only to understand why it will undoubtedly be a frontrunner at the awards ceremonies this year.
The Road is in cinemas from today
