The Road (2009)Director: John Hillcoat
Writers: Cormac McCarthy (Novel), Joe Penhall (Screenplay)
Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, Charlize Theron
John Hillcoat's The Road (2009) was one of my most anticipated movies of the year. Well I guess it was really one of my most anticipated movies of last year but then the studio kept pushing back the release. Not that I blame them, I can see how this would be a hard movie to market. I did start to worry a bit after they pushed it back though. I was beginning to think that it wouldn't live up to my expectations.
It is kind of hard to say whether or not it lived up to those expectations because I tried my best to leave them at the door. I will say that I did really enjoy the movie though. Well, I don't know if this is really a movie that you enjoy as much as you appreciate. It is, for the most part, a pretty bleak movie even though there is a thread of hope woven through it. And that thread of hope is what keeps the father and son moving down the road in the film.
The focus of The Road is the characters. They really make the movie come to life. The father/son relationship between Viggo Mortensen (only credited as The Man) and Kodi Smit-McPhee (only credited as The Boy) is extremely well done. In a world where it would just be so easy to give up and roll over and die, this father is teaching his son how to live and why life is still important even in a world without much to live for. The acting really stands out in the movie and if it had not been great the movie would have suffered. Everyone really carries their parts perfectly. Even the actors that only have a few minutes of screen time like Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce and Charlize Theron really shine in their roles.The great acting in combination with the great writing and story creates very memorable and realistic characters. While the movie does seem to separate characters into good guys and bad guys, all the characters are just doing what they feel they need to do to survive. There are even times when The Man breaks down and does what could be considered a bad thing. His son acts as his conscience for a lot of the movie and it really makes you wonder what The Man would be doing in this world if he didn't have his son to keep his conscience. While the father is teaching his son to survive the son is also teaching the father quite a bit about his own humanity.
The other star of the film is the landscapes that the characters inhabit. John Hilcoat manages to create extremely realistic and bleak looking landscapes that seem to go on forever. While some of the landscapes had to be rendered in CGI they all still look very real. I would be hard pressed to tell the difference between what was real and what was computer generated in the film. I never once thought about the CGI during the film. It wasn't until after the film that I starting thinking that some of the large scale settings would have had to be created by computer, they were just too vast to exist in real life. In my opinion this is the definition of well used and well placed CGI, it never once takes me out of the movie.Overall I really enjoyed the movie. It is definitely a bleak film but the thread of hope running through it keeps it from becoming a depressing film. It will leave you thinking about just how far you would go to survive in a similar situation but it also leaves you with hope that survival is an option even in the most dire circumstances.
Rating: 8/10
2 comments:
I loved the film. It's a hard one to compare to the book due to the style in which that was written but I was pleased the film was so 'un-hollywood'. Beautifully bleak.
Yeah, one of the things that made the books so great was the almost poetry like style of the writing. The movie obviously doesn't have that but it does manage to have its own style and is a really great flick.
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