When a studio decides to delay the release of a film by a year, it's usually not the best sign. And when it gets pushed back by two months in the weeks before its official release? Not exactly comforting. Such was the case with John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Road." But at last the day has finally come, after more than a year of re-edits and re-shoots. So how does the final package measure up? It's not easy to say. Hillcoat's film, written by Joe Penhall, stays so close to the bare-bones novel that after a certain point the story loses suspense for those who have read the (excellent) book. For the uninitiated there is most likely a more powerful story lying in wait, but for those who have read the novel, after a point it will be difficult for "The Road" to rise above the level of "good," to the level of "great" that it had the potential to achieve.
After a quick flashback involving the Mother (Charlize Theron), the film proper opens just like the book, with the Man (Viggo Mortensen) and Boy (Kodi-Smit McPhee) trekking down the gray landscape of somewhere in the ruined United States, without any explanation of what has caused this situation. And I mean gray. More than anything, Hillcoat has captured the look of McCarthy's post-apocalyptic vision in its limited color scheme, although there are one or two edits where the tone noticeably changes from sepia-brown to ashen gray in the same scene. The film's few inhabitants are made-up well too. No one has a ridiculous set of gleaming white teeth; people are dirty, ragged, and worn. But for a novel as difficult to adapt to the big screen as "The Road," this is one department on which there could be little realistic improvement. But there are areas for improvement. McCarthy's novel had no chapters. There were either paragraph breaks or a line of three asterisks to show the end of a "scene." In the novel, this spacing device gave two distinct feelings: the paragraph breaks seemed to run into each other and almost flow together, to create a distorted sense of how much time had passed, while the asterisks represented a harder, concrete end and beginning. Unfortunately, Hillcoat's somewhat jerky style of pacing, which was effective in his Australian western "The Proposition" (2005) doesn't always match the flow of McCarthy's sparse but generally fluid prose. It's not a devastating flaw, but on occasion it does disrupt the build-up of atmosphere.
As far as the performances go, "The Road" is a tricky one, mostly because I've read the book. The novel was so spare, especially in dialogue that after reading it I remembered thinking that there would have to be a major overhaul in the spoken words to make an impact on film. Yet while Penhall's script is generally brief on dialogue, he does make the wise decision of expanding the dialogue beyond "yes-no-OK" conversations that are effective. There's also some occasional narration from the Man, which is used a handful of times at the beginning, and then sprinkled over some brief portions of the end. There are also flashback scenes involving the Woman, which were as absent as an explanation for what caused the apocalypse (although that's not what this story is about, at its heart, so stop asking). Said flashbacks give Mortensen more material to work with and a little more insight into his generally inflexible personality. Such changes serve the principal actors well and help to give the father-son relationship even more resonance than was contained on the page. In allowing us to see scenes of the Man and Boy fighting more than in the book and with expanded dialogue, we get a better sense of these characters who are quite different in how they want to live their lives in the post-apocalyptic world around them. Mortensen, who has steadily been building himself up as an actor for people to notice after "The Lord of the Rings," has found what is easily one of his best two roles (whether it's better than "Eastern Promises" is hard to say) and he plays it well. There is sternness, and even a bit of shocking cruelty in his desperation to survive, but also love, as shown by the way he speaks to his son, looks at him, or the gentleness with which he touches him in a scene when the two finally get a chance to cut their ragged hair. Smit-McPhee, a total newcomer, is a strong foil, with his innocent, more trusting view of humanity. To listen to the openness with which he talks or asks questions is to feel a pang of horror: no child should ever have to grow up in a world like this. The lightness of his voice and the little quivers within, coupled with some of his lines, are enough to cut straight through the ashen surroundings and go straight to the heart, without being manipulative or mawkish.
But the big question about this film is how does the adaptation work when it comes to literalness. It's sort of a mixed bag in the end. Despite the additions of flashbacks, expanded scenes, or small moments that weren't present, the plot is so faithful that, as I've said, it loses suspense. Not that it isn't interesting or compelling. To be fair, the first half has some moments of tension, and the literalness only helps heighten the horror of what I'll simply refer to as the "basement scene." It's really around the second half of the film where I began to feel a sense of over-familiarity, which is unfortunate because these same events in the novel were still quite compelling. And they are in the film in varying degrees, but because I've read the book and I know how each and every significant even is going to turn out, AND because Penhall at this point puts too much faith in McCarthy's vision so as to give up on his own, that the impact feels slightly muted. "The Road" may not have quite achieved greatness, but in its small changes, and in its performances, it on the whole is a success. And after the long road this film has traveled on to finally be released, it's certainly admirable, though not quite amazing.
On the technical front there's really nothing to fault, save for two brief instances of color-correction shift.The visuals are appropriately bleak and gray, as are the wastelands dotted by wrecked neighborhoods, gas stations, and convenience stores. At times it can even be somewhat beautiful, namely the handful of wide shots where the Man and Boy move across a backdrop of gray sky and clouds. There's also Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' delicate, yet haunting score, which helps propel the film along and fills in some of the cracks in the atmosphere left by some of the edits.
Grade: B
