The fact that John Hillcoat’s movie does not match the poignancy and depth of Cormac McCarthy’s masterful novel ‘The Road’ is no surprise but no disgrace either.
I can’t really think what the Australian director could have done better – the performances are brilliant and the photography is sublime. The soundtrack by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis evokes the mood of sadness bordering on despair.
The insurmountable problem he faces is that it is simply impossible to translate
Cormac McCarthy’s poetry and lyricism into a visual language.
McCarthy conjures up the feeling of surviving on a blighted planet by making the smallest details take on the aspect of profound significance. For example, the father’s struggle to repair the wheel of the shopping cart ,which contains all his, and his son’s, worldly possessions, speaks volumes of their plight but would not make for compelling cinema.
Equally the sheer poetic force and humanity of McCarthy’s vision of the post apocalyptic world is so powerful not because there is a gripping plot but because of the way he gets into the heart and soul of the relationship between father and child.
That Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee convey this bond without resorting to mawkish, sentimentalized clichés is a tribute to their acting skills and the restraint of Hillcoat. However, on-screen their situation is moving; in the novel it is heartbreaking.
In a bizarre act of censorship, the movie of ‘The Road’ has not been released in Italy, where I live. The distributors here fear for the sensitivity of the general public and have decided that the grim reality the movie depicts would be too depressing for them. For me this is another sign to me that the movie got the fundamentals about right.
Who wants post-apocalyptic feel good movies, anyway?
