Movie Review: The Road (2009, Directed by John Hillcoat)

Adapting the literary works of Cormac McCarthy is an arguably impossible task. The Coen Brothers’ 2007 masterwork No Country for Old Men worked primarily because the McCarthy source material is one of the author’s weakest works. The Coens were able to take McCarthy’s uncharacteristically conventional material and inject it with enhanced character development and crisp, darkly amusing dialogue.

Unfortunately, director John Hillcoat’s adaptation of McCarthy’s bestselling The Road is not as successful. The problem lies not with its visuals. Hillcoat and company effectively convey the novel’s post-apocalyptic setting through a monochrome cinematographic strategy and a set which invokes a tour through Dante’s Inferno. Nor are the lead performances problematic. Viggo Mortensen is nuanced and emotionally intelligent as always. Kodi Smit-McPhee, in the role of the boy, brings the right combination of bravery and pathos. The real problems with The Road are the script and the music.

McCarthy’s brooding, yet ultimately hopeful novel, full of the complexity and ambiguities of human survival, is transformed into a film worthy of Oscar contention. I don’t mean this as a compliment. The actors do their best with the material they are given. However, the script asks them to come right out and say what McCarthy’s source material subtly implies. As if this lack of subtlety in the screenplay weren’t enough to edge The Road towards conventional Hollywoodization, Nick Cave’s melodramatic score serves to underline every emotional moment with a musical punch in the face. The apocalyptic material is dark enough the way it is. We don’t need to be continually reminded with the dialogue and the music what a dire situation the characters find themselves in.

Ultimately, The Road commits the artistic sin that annoys me more than any other. It insults the audience member’s intelligence. We can speculate on the author’s thematic concerns without having to be told what to think directly in a voiceover. We can soak in the work’s emotional complexity without being subjected to Cave’s pulsating score.

Despite the film’s major shortcomings, it is still successful in visually replicating the world McCarthy describes. I enjoyed the film very much on this level. I just wish the filmmakers weren’t intent on winning an Academy Award. Hillcoat’s movie made me want to read the novel once again.