Review: The Road

I read Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer-winning book The Road about a year ago at the suggestion of a friend.  It’s a great book, and my fears about seeing the film revolved around two feelings; (a) movies adapted from books frequently suck; and (b) the book is super-depressing.  Someone thought it was a good idea to give the film to a relatively inexperienced director, Aussie John Hillcoat, whose biggest prior film was a western I don't think I've heard of called The Proposition, starring fellow Australians Guy Pearce and Noah Taylor.

In The Road, Viggo Mortensen plays the man, a nameless father of a young boy in the U.S. at an unspecified time.  Australian Kodi Smit-McPhee  plays the boy, who is at best guess around 10 or 11 years of age.  The world is dead, or at least the part of the world they inhabit.  There are no animals, no living trees or plants, and just a scant few people, most of whom should be feared.  Fearful that they may not survive another winter and hopeful that they will find a better environment, they take to the road, headed south.

Through flashbacks, we learn that the man’s wife and boy’s mother, played by Charlize Theron, chose not  to survive in this world.  The man, growing ill with something I'm sure is far worse than smoker's hack, could not bring himself to follow her path, and instead chooses to teach the boy how to survive in this new world.  Their travels bring them both horror and joy, but mostly just horror.  They seldom interact with others, but we are introduced briefly to a couple characters along the way in cameo appearances by Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce.

The movie does not focus on the “why” or “how” of this destroyed world, but instead focuses on the relationship of a boy and his father.  Hillcoat skillfully delivers McCarthy’s work in visual form, laying out what a man should, can and cannot do out of love for his son.  Weepy movie goers may want to pack a tissue, or perhaps a pack of tissues.  See the film, but schedule something happy afterward.  My imdb rating: 8/10.