Typically, sadness steals over you like the effects of a very strong, very sweet wine; it builds in your abdomen like a bad stomachache; or it festers like an open wound. But in the film “The Road,” director John Hillcoat drops sadness on you like an atomic bomb.
“The Road” is a ruthless, desolate film, portraying the struggles of a father and son to preserve both their humanity and their lives in a post-apocalyptic landscape where all traces of human civilization have been erased. It’s a blasted dystopia where morality has been reduced to a stark choice between cannibalism and prolonged starvation.
You never find out what apocalypse destroyed the world, and in fact the film in general eschews explanation and details to focus a magnifying glass on what happens to the bonds of family in the face of apocalypse.
“The Road” doesn’t even give you a traditional soundtrack; there is no kindly orchestral music to romanticize the sounds of booted feet crunching on frozen tundra, no violins to soothe the rasping, dying cough of the man (Viggo Mortensen) or the merciless howling of the wind.
But the unceasing gloom of the film is calculated. “The Road” may be unapologetically bleak and unsentimental, but the film’s principal subject is love. The darker the film gets, the more poignant the relationship between the father and son grows.
Mortensen, 20 pounds lighter than we’ve usually seen him, turns in what may be the best performance of his career. His character is desperately trying to protect his son from cannibalistic raiders even with the knowledge that he will soon die of an unexplained disease. Mortensen plays this conflict with admirable honesty, and his ragged desperation is emotionally wrenching to behold.
The imminent death and abandonment of the child (Kodi Smit-McPhee) creates a palpable sense of foreboding, punctuated by Mortensen’s ever-present rasping cough.
Smit-McPhee, a young south Australian actor, plays the role of the son with a precocious fragility that is pitch perfect.
However, in the inevitable comparison to the book that is its source material, “The Road” suffers.
The book of the same name was such a fully realized dystopia that reading it seemed to leave an emotional crater in your psyche. Cormac McCarthy’s prose was unyieldingly spare, cutting character development and plot details in favor of bleak dialogue and brutal imagery.
“The Road” is a faithful rendering of the admirable book, but McCarthy’s work doesn’t translate well to a screenplay. The bleak urgency that imbued the novel with a harsh beauty gets kind of boring in the film. The characters are constructed in a way that robs them of a purpose ““ they’re just trying to survive ““ and thus the plot lacks a driving force, which will leave you feeling slightly underwhelmed when the film concludes.
But “The Road” is still well worth the price of admission ““ just prepare to feel like crap afterwards.
E-mail Shyong at fshyong@media.ucla.edu.