The Road

No Future

"The Road" is a one-note road version of "Waiting for Godot," minus
Samuel Beckett's brilliant sense of existentialist humor. Based on
Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel, director John Hillcoat makes no attempt
to convert screenwriter Joe Penhall's straight-line rendition into a
narrative arc. It doesn't help that the characters don't have names.
Viggo Mortensen plays "the Man." His 11-year-old son is "the Boy"
(played blankly by Kodi Smit-McPhee). After being deserted by "the
Wife" (played by Charlize Theron), Man and Boy wander a gray
post-apocalyptic America where no explanation of what happed to wipe
out most of the country is ever given. Determined to make it south to
the ocean, our homeless duo encounter marauding gangs of murderers and
cannibals. The baddies are menacing enough, but any attendant suspense
is blunted by the movie's lack of narrative structure. The Man has only
two bullets in his revolver, reserved for murder-suicide should the
situation ever require such desperate measures. Robert Duvall plays the
film's most empathetic character, a fellow traveler on the film's road
to nowhere.

Of
Cormac McCarthy's last six novels, three have been turned into films
and another one ("Blood Meridian"–to be directed by Todd Field) is due
for release in 2011. While Billy Bob Thornton's laconic directorial
effort with "All the Pretty Horses" (2000) went largely unnoticed, the
Coen Brothers' 2005 rendering of "No Country for Old Men" shed a
different kind of light on the darkly comic filmic possibilities of
McCarthy's work. The Coens transmogrified "No Country" into a film that
somehow encompassed implacable greed and cruelty with a jaundiced
satirical eye that pushed the audience into thinking about America's
political influence on its dusty border-patrolled landscape. Indeed,
satire is the very thing that's missing from John Hillcoat's prosaic
treatment of what should have been an expansive commentary on America's
knee-jerk consumerist culture that's driving the Industrial Revolution
off a cliff and taking Mother Nature with it.

John
Hillcoat struck it lucky in 2005 adapting Nick Cave's wild-and-wooly
Australian western "The Proposition," by nurturing a Hitchcock-inspired
sense of suspense and unpredictable violence that lent historical
meaning to the material. But Hillcoat is on far less stable ground when
dipping his toes into an emaciated futuristic environment.

The
filmmakers treat McCarthy's multi-layered survival novel as nothing
more than a handing off of generational hope into the hands of
strangers that seem no more capable or trustworthy than those that came
before. Certainly, Joe Penhall does a disservice to McCarthy's text by
inserting flashbacks about the wife, seemingly for the purpose of
adding Charlize Theron's name to the credits in the hope of attracting
a wider audience. "The Road" needed a more worldly hands-on auteur like
a Tarantino or a Verhoeven who could craft the script and put it on
film with an overarching influence of humor and editorial meaning. If
you look at a film like "Inglourious Basterds" or "Starship Troopers"
you find yourself pulled into a whirlpool of narrative inertia that's
entirely absent in "The Road" because the filmmakers embrace an
ambivalent attitude regarding subtext. For such rich source material,
the filmmakers have left out the most important ingredient: ideas.