Blu-Ray Review: The Road
Fri, July 9, 2010 
The Road is a movie with a terrible reputation. At one point hoped to be a 2009 Oscar contender, it was quietly released into theaters after many delays and disappeared almost as quietly. People who've Netflixed it out of curiousity and were perhaps fooled by its terrible trailer that made it look an action movie (the studio had no idea what to do with this film) were turned off by the gruesomness of the post-apocalyptic hellhole that this movie is.
But if you see this movie when you know what you're getting into, you're going to discover that this is an amazing, criminally underlooked film. Based on the 2006 Cormac McCarthy novel, The Road is a story about a father and son travelling through a world destroyed by an unknown disaster. We never find out what caused the world to end, nor do we even learn the main characters' names, but that doesn't matter. This is a story about survival, and what a father needs to do when his only job left in the world is protect his son.
Unlike The Lovely Bones, an adaptation that I was so disappointed with, the film version of The Road doesn't pull any punches from the book, even though it doesn't include the book's most gruesome moment (yes, the baby scene, for those of you who've read the book, although it was apparently filmed). The rest of it is all there, the cannibalism, the starvation, the absolute dread and danger in almost every place they go.
A movie where much is left unexplained and the characters are nameless wouldn't work without good performances, and here the acting is extraordinary. In a behind-the-scenes feature on the blu-ray, Viggo Mortensen actually holds up his copy of the book which is filled with notes about the story and his character and you can see every bit of it in his performance. This is a character who is not a survivalist-type. Ten years ago he was a normal guy, a husband and an expectant father. Now he's someone who has to teach his child how to put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger if they get into trouble. When a man threatens his son and tells him that he knows he's never shot anyone, he's right. You sympathize with him because he's not an action hero. He was such perfect casting for this role and it's unfortunate it went mostly unrecognized at awards time.
The same can be said for Kodi Smit-McPhee as the boy. First of all, the kid is Australian, but you never know it watching the movie because his American accent is flawless. Obviously, this is a tough role, not just because the things he goes through are horrible (again, he's barely 10 and he knows how to blow his brains out), but it's a character that played wrong could run the risk of becoming annoying. But he's an amazing little actor, and his performance was downright heartbreaking. There comes a point in the movie where you realize he's protecting his father almost as much as his father is protecting him, and their chemistry onscreen together is flawless.
The movie also features Charlize Theron, who appears in flashbacks as the wife of Viggo's character, and is given a little more to do than she did in the book (although she ends the same way). A barely-recognizable Robert Duvall has a small, but memorable role as a fellow survivor. But it's the performance of Michael K. Williams as The Thief that's sticks in your head long after the movie has ended.
Director John Hillcoat really got this book, and he made an incredible film. Yes, it's as depressing and disturbing as everyone says it is, and the ending is as ambiguous as the rest of the story was. But regardless, I recommend giving it a chance. It's a terrific film.
Reader Comments (1)
Great review Jen! I'll have to check this one out.