A dirty, dishevelled man pushes a shopping cart down a desolate highway while clutching the hand of a child. Helpless men and women flee from ruthless gangs of armed men who kill for sport and worse. Fires consume vast swaths of land as the last traces of life disappear from dead lakes and forests.
There’s no shortage of grim imagery in The Road, the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prizewinner about the journey of a man and his son across a ravaged, depopulated landscape after some unspecified catastrophe. Much of this is given additional weight by the presence of Viggo Mortensen, the only contemporary American star who’s gaunt enough for the task (and boy, is he gaunt).
Yet these images — brought to the screen by Australian director John Hillcoat — do not belong to some far-off dystopia. While the task of bringing such a celebrated book to the screen is never without its complications and compromises, one thing that the film makes starkly and uncomfortably clear is that this is not science fiction. After all, many of the people in our world live like this right now.
The director realized that as soon as he read McCarthy’s description of that shopping cart.
“That image just struck a chord,” says Hillcoat in an interview at TIFF in September. “I thought, ‘Hey, we’ve seen this — this is the homeless, they live it everyday.’ There was such an immediacy about the world that Cormac created. So in making the movie, we looked at places like New Orleans post-Katrina and the aftermaths of Mount St. Helens and 9/11 because it felt like he was writing about that rather than some kind of railroad ride through a fictitious world. These scenes resonate about America today and the fear that’s out there now.”
Needless to say, The Road hardly qualifies as light entertainment for the holiday season. Nor could it ever have been, what with the darkness of McCarthy’s vision of a society long past the point of collapse. Some devotees of the book may feel the film has a touch too much sweetness due to Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ musical score or the events in its last moments. They may also lament the absence of barbecued babies. But Hillcoat’s adaptation stays true to the essence of the book and captures its emotional core. It retains great power as an allegory about parenthood and the very serious business of preparing any child for a hostile world, be it this one or the one we’re heading toward.
That the movie exhibits such strength is welcome news to those of us who interpreted its release-date changes — The Road was originally scheduled to hit theatres in autumn 2008 — as a sign of trouble. One fear was that the film’s backers found Hillcoat’s take too bleak and uncommercial. The director had been a decidedly non-Hollywood choice to adapt such a well-known book, though McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian had a palpable influence on Hillcoat’s similarly brutal 2005 western The Proposition. (That film was positively cuddly compared to his first feature, Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, a vicious 1988 prison flick that included a memorable early screen appearance by Nick Cave, Hillcoat’s long-time pal and collaborator.)
In a hotel suite down the hall from Hillcoat’s room, Mortensen explains that the director needed more time to finish than originally planned and that this was a good thing for everyone.
“It took him until the beginning of this year to really feel like he had what he wanted,” says the actor, sporting an Australian Rules football team jersey given to him by his young co-star, Kodi Smit-McPhee. “It’s not a film you put out in the spring or summer so they waited till this slot, really. It was good, in a way, to have time go by, because when Kodi and I got to see it together at the Venice film festival, we were removed from it enough to be objective and look at it honestly. I thought the spirit of the book was captured. As for the emotional journey that we had to go on and the tests we had as actors and as a team, I felt like we’d passed. That felt good.”
What they also achieve is giving this seemingly vast story a small-scaled sense of intimacy. Though other figures do make an impression in this elemental drama, be it Charlize Theron as the man’s long-gone wife, Robert Duvall as an elderly traveller or The Wire’s Michael K. Williams as a desperate thief, it continually returns to the core story of man and boy.
“We kept trying to bring it back to that as well because it was so easy to get carried away,” says Hillcoat. “In fact, we shot more stuff with cannibals and that kind of stuff, but when I saw it all as a four-and-a-half-hour cut, I realized it was all about distilling it down. It always came back to protecting that relationship.”
It was a necessary choice in Mortensen’s view. “On the surface, the story is these two characters, an adult and a child travelling across a devastated landscape. It’s a simple concept — they’re just trying to stay alive. But emotionally, the journey is very complicated.”
The actor felt that he had a lot of support making that journey, not just from Hillcoat or the very gifted Smit-McPhee but everyone else involved. In that respect, the experience of making The Road reminded him of his time making The Lord of the Rings trilogy, a production that was “exponentially bigger” yet retained a similar vibe. “That’s because the crew was really into the story and the book,” he says. “Like with The Lord of the Rings, the book was floating around. I had it with me all the time — I still have it in my bag. It meant something to everyone that this was the day we were doing the scene with the old man or the scene with the thief.”
Whatever the circumstances that created it, the finished film benefits from a careful balance of larger and smaller elements, which Hillcoat credits to the “brilliant macro/micro thing” going on in McCarthy’s book. Says the filmmaker, “It has this very personal, very intimate, loving element but then it’s got this bigger canvas you can interpret in the literal sense. It’s about imagining the collapse of everything, which plays into our worst fears about the environment, wars, economic and political catastrophes. There are even ways you can interpret this as an old parable.”
Indeed, the recent news that the film is being pitched to church groups is one weird new wrinkle in the saga of The Road. Hillcoat admits that a spiritual interpretation is certainly valid, what with the father repeatedly urging his son to keep “carrying the fire.” But he also feels that “Cormac never drove that home too far.” Says Hillcoat, “I think it’s something I’m happy for people to interpret that way if they wish, if that’s how they view things. But for me it’s a human story and carrying the fire is really talking about the human spirit that connects us, our higher self as humans.”
Mortensen hopes that audiences will understand the lesson that lies within the story’s many horrors. It’s a lesson that his character also has to learn: that survival means more than enduring the worst. “It’s not enough just to live more, to kill if you have to or whatever,” says Mortensen. “Carrying the fire means being human. There is some ethical standard, some code of conduct — it’s a choice, not an obligation. Most people in their situation don’t see it that way, and understandably so. When the chips are really down the way they are in this movie — they couldn’t get much more extreme — you find out who you are and what you’re made of. You make mistakes along the way, but you find out who you are and who your friends are.”
Futureschlock Director John Hillcoat says he worked hard to make
The Road distinct from other movie visions of post-apocalyptic dire straits. It’s also one of several recent takes on how the world ends and what comes afterwards — if you’re hungry for more fresh doom, try
Zombieland,
2012 or the forthcoming
The Book of Eli, which looks like
The Road retooled as a kick-ass Denzel Washington action pic.
Each of these examples will eventually find a place in the canon of films in which bad shit happens on a very large scale. If our favourites in this genre are any indication, here’s some of what we can expect from the end times. You’d best keep some bottled water in the basement.
JAThe Omega Man (1971)
Nature of apocalypse: Most of humanity is wiped out by plague caused by Chinese and Soviet use of biological warfare.
Worst threat to survivors: Albino mutant death-cult hippies, a.k.a. Charlton Heston’s natural enemy.
Time of the Wolf (2003)
Nature of apocalypse: Unspecified disaster sends populace pouring out of cities in search of uncontaminated water and stuff not already on fire.
Worst threat to survivors: Nasty French people.
A Boy and His Dog (1975)
Nature of apocalypse: World Wars III and IV render the world a cinder by the year 2024, with male scavengers comprising most of the remaining populace still on the surface.
Worst threat to survivors: Sex-starved, subterranean women who try to mess with your head.
Night of the Comet (1984)
Nature of apocalypse: Rogue comet turns most folks into red dust and pretty much the rest into zombies.
Worst threat to survivors: Jerks who hassle you at the mall.
The Road Warrior (1981)
Nature of apocalypse: World crumbles due to fuel shortages, resulting in “whirlwind of looting and a firestorm of fear.”
Worst threat to survivors: Guys with mohawks on motorbikes or, given the beliefs of star Mel Gibson, possibly the Jews.