The Road [DVD]

I loved the novel of The Road and also thoroughly enjoyed the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's other novel No Country For Old Men [Blu-ray] [2007], so I couldn't wait to see this one. It stars Viggo Mortensen as "The Man" who has survived the apocalypse and is now taking care of his young son and trying to keep them both alive, struggling against exhaustion, starvation and cannibals. I knew from reading the book that this wouldn't be a happy film, in fact you couldn't get much further from it. That doesn't stop it from being an exciting and heartbreaking film exploring man's will to survive and the love that he has for his son.

The film is beautifully shot, being partly filmed in post-Katrina New Orleans (as well as Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Oregon, I believe), the scenery is bleak, cold and depressing and most importantly authentically destroyed land, but is equally breathtaking and extremely atmospheric. Acting from Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee is very believable and their bond together did feel genuine to me and mirrored the characters of the novel perfectly. The story is just about survival a coping with the end of the world, basically - nothing more, nothing less. I particularly liked how you never really know why the whole of the human race has been wiped out, so that part of the story is left completely up to you to decide or guess.

The Road is a very haunting and quite powerful film that is very faithful to the novel, but didn't quite make the impact that the book did as it is always harder to feel what the characters do in a movie as opposed to using your own imagination when reading their emotions in a well written piece of literature. This is no fault of the film though, so don't let that put you off. I definitely rate this highly and will most certainly purchase it on Blu Ray or DVD when it is released.

This was one of the finest books I have ever read. I did not rush to see the film, because the mental images the book created would be (and were) realised with graphic nastiness and genuine scares.

Mortensson was superb as the father, a supreme physical performance and the visuals were stunning, the bleak weather and demonstration decay and destruction was done with a superb light touch and excellent attention to detail. The scene in the house, with the discovery of the captives in the basement that were being kept to feed those above was so horrific, but the following moments of near capture somehow lacked tension and the father deciding to shoot the boy (if discovered) rather than allow him that fate just didn't quite work. If I had to judge this film purely on the aesthetics then it would get 5* but the realisation of the horrors that were written on the page are not enough. The central heart of the film is the boy.

He wasn't up to the task, I'm not sure who would be, but for me he was the weak link and when i coupled that with a rushed final 3rd then the film just dipped away from being superb to merely good and well worth seeing and not unmissable. You are supposed to be caught up in the fact that this is a journey where the father is in control and 'protecting the boy' which is true in a literal sense. The boy has a sense of innocence that there must be good left out in the world and if allowed he could find it and harness it. While the father is obsessed with the day to day survival the boy wrestles, unknowingly, with the future of mankind. It is his benevolent spirit and his refusal to believe no else still has it that drives the 'hope' of the narrative.

The father is so well realised, his pain and fear beautifully portrayed... his cowardice at not being able to kill himself and his son is eating away at him. What doesn't work so well is that the son provides that spark of hope for the future... the father clinging to it as a justification for his failure. But for me the boy had a continuous sulky expression and lacked the emotional acting range to convince and simply could not compete with Mortensson. The script cuts an essential sequence on the beach, where the son nurtures the ailing father, and its there that the power shift really takes place... the son realises his father is becoming like the men that hunt them, a baddie, and that he doesn't like this. he becomes old enough to think for himself and realise that Good guys and bad guys is not definition his father understands any more.

Instead the film lurches to the theft of their trolley and the slow kill of the thief through the fathers failing sense of humanity. Its a superb scene, but this should be the tipping point of realisation for the boy and the part where hope rests with the child and not the father. The father is now part of the problem not the solution. The film misses this subtle shift electing to go for blunt trauma and then focuses on the physical decline of the father and his reliance on his son. The final scenes felt rushed and the father's death lacked the pathos and true depth of emotion they needed to convey.

As with the book I came away with hope - the film is less subtle about it but at least we concurred. I would give this a 31/2 in truth but 4 felt more hopeful than 3.

Steev
The Frog and the Scorpion

The Road See my review of the book for the content. The DVD is a brilliantly faithful adaptation, and even more depressing than the book. I guess, one would expect some degree of hollywoodization, but none is evident here. For fans of depressing literature, but not recommended to anyone of a weak disposition