The Road (John Hillcoat, 2009)

[Peckinbauch]

In speaking of possible directors in place of Hillcoat, I personally think Paul Thomas Anderson would have been a good pick for either Road or Meridian. As a huge fan of TWBB, it seems as though Anderson may have a credible artistic insight into the Gothic Americana that is present in so much of McCarthy's work (Although I am a fan of Hillcoat as well).

I bring up Meridian because I believe Field to be a rather odd choice to be at the helm of that particular project. Nothing against the man. Just surprised.

Coincidentally, this is my first post on the forum. So. Hi everybody!

[LQ]

AV Club interview with John Hillcoat.
The Road is really the most translated fiction book in, as he puts it, 'modern times'? That sounds like a specious claim....

[Mr Sausage]

AV Club interview with John Hillcoat.
The Road is really the most translated fiction book in, as he puts it, 'modern times'? That sounds like a specious claim....

That'd be nice, but I'm pretty sure something like The Da Vinci Code is translated more.

[domino harvey]

He said "fiction," you wily Illuminati-denying mason

[hidaniel]

Ugh, saw this a couple of days ago. So, so blase about it. Hillcoat took a book filled with tension and about the immediacy of survival and turned it into over-sentimental crud about a man who can't let go of the past. Which on its own is fine but has little to do with the novel -- just like the ending of the movie, thanks for getting rid of any ambiguity there. I almost expected REM's Happy Shiny People to play over the closing credits.

The Proposition was very good but but this does not bode well for his possible adaptation of Blood Meridian. I can see it turning into a movie where The Kid thinks his mother is still alive and the movie focusing on his quest to find her with a band of merry misfits and miscreants tagging along in the old west. Possibly as a musical.

As for who should do Blood Meridian; I'd love to see Lynch's take on it. The damn thing is one long nightmare about the devil with crazy dream sequences interspersed throughout. I think he would have a good chance of getting the feeling right which to me is more important to a McCarthy novel than anything else.

[kaujot]

I haven't seen the movie yet, but from what you've said Hillcoat took McCarthy's statement that the book is just about a father loving his son a bit too seriously.

[Grand Illusion]

The film looks great. Cinematography, effects, and art direction are all top-notch.

That said, I don't think The Road does much else new with the post-apocalyptic world other than that. There's no real creative use of the space. The roving gangs, the preserved food, the abandoned houses - seen it all before.

I actually did like the flashbacks because

Spoiler

it established the motif of Viggo always waking by spasming his body out of nightmare. That was one original detail of the effect this world has on its inhabitants.

Mortensen himself is serviceable, but the Boy is terrible. He walks around with his mouth open, and he's not given much to do with the script. He's either asking questions or moralizing in the middle of an otherwise interesting scenario. The screenwriters build scenes the same way several times. Viggo does or does not do something ethically questionable to survive, and the Boy, in obvious dialogue, questions him. Repeat.

The Boy also has zero character arc, which makes him even more one-dimensional. At no point is his moral compass shattered or even slightly-off. Compare this with the layered performance of Max Records in Where the Wild Things Are. An audience doesn't have to always like or intellectually relate to a character to empathize with them.

The ending only further expresses how much this character flatlines.

Spoiler

The one interesting thesis of the film was that, apocalyptic milieu or not, a parent's one greatest fear is rearing a child to take on the world themselves. And this Boy learns nothing from the father. There's zero character arc.

The father keeps the two of them alive throughout the duration of the film. The grim world full of cannibals and gangs and random archers is dangerous. And the father stole and killed to get through it. So when the father dies, the Boy trusts the first guy to come along with a crooked smile, and everything is A-OK!

What's the message there? The kid was dumb. Also, if there was no character growth for him, what was the purpose of the father character at all? Is the point of the film that no matter how you raise your child, he'll ignore you but still end up ok? The ending moment of the film demolishes any foundation of an interesting thesis that the film might have had about raising a child. It's completely superfluous.

[James]

The person who writes on The Playlist blog likened this to Time of the Wolf. I haven't seen The Road, but it sounds like an apt comparison that makes me want to watch Haneke's movie again.

[LQ]

I was hoping to come out of The Road with something more positive to say than the previous posters, but they're dead-on. It's unremarkable and stolid. The film has nothing new to offer, and isn't all that good in and of itself. For being such a quiet, sparse movie, there was a dismaying lack of subtlety in the dialogue and the music; both fell thudding on the ears. A written phrase as precious as "carrying the fire" in the novel became an inane-sounding non sequitur when spoken aloud by the Child, especially in the end scene. The Wife's "other families are doing it" sounded ridiculous in the context. Although I thought both Viggo and the kid did well in their respective rolls, the interactions between the two did little to involve emotionally. The maudlin & cliche "stirring" piano music was very off-putting as well, it shouldn't have been scored at all IMO.

The ending...sigh. Grand Illusion said it best. I suppose that's a very valid criticism of the book too, but I don't remember it feeling so cheap when I read it.

[greggster59]

From the moment I finished the novel it was obvious to me that any attempt to adapt it to another medium would fall far too short. The spare prose evoked many vivid images and emotions in me and trying to capture this in a movie would be something like trying to describe what it feels like to skydive.

Ain't gonna go. [-(

[blindside8zao]

I don't know about the movie, as I haven't had the opportunity to see it because of the release stunt, but, I watched time of the wolf right after I read the Road and felt it served as a good follow-up. If this is a failure I'd suggest that movie for anyone who wants a remake of the book. Very eerily similar tones.

[tajmahal]

From the moment I finished the novel it was obvious to me that any attempt to adapt it to another medium would fall far too short. The spare prose evoked many vivid images and emotions in me and trying to capture this in a movie would be something like trying to describe what it feels like to skydive.

Ain't gonna go. [-(

Agreed. I've just finished the novel. To add to your comments, I can also see where a filmed version could be boring. I'm not quite sure an entire film could rely on the minimalist conversations between the father and son. There are a number of key scenes which are very filmic, but I can imagine how there could be one note to the film. I'll be interested to see what John Hillcoat has achieved.

[hidaniel]

Agreed. I've just finished the novel. To add to your comments, I can also see where a filmed version could be boring. I'm not quite sure an entire film could rely on the minimalist conversations between the father and son. There are a number of key scenes which are very filmic, but I can imagine how there could be one note to the film. I'll be interested to see what John Hillcoat has achieved.

Disagreed. The film could have gone with less dialogue ala Le Dernier Combat. What it lacked was any sense of urgency. Everyone in the movie walks around like they're on a Sunday stroll and even though they're starving to death, almost every scene has the father and son eating something -- as brought to you by the Coca-Cola corporation.

[MyNameCriterionForum]

almost every scene has the father and son eating something -- as brought to you by the Coca-Cola corporation.

"Brawndo's Got Electrolytes!"

[colinr0380]

Spoilers for the novel of The Road (and presumably the film adaptation):

I have not seen the film of this as yet but spent the last month or so reading the Cormac McCarthy novel on my work commute. This is really my first introduction to Cormac McCarthy's work (aside from listening to a read through/explanation video of Blood Meridian a while back, and I can see a kind of Old Testament Biblical father-son throughline may turn out to be a key characteristic of McCarthy) and I found myself rather moved by the story. I like that it sort of starts prosaic and tersely descriptive (conversation-wise as well, with all of those run on "and then this and then this and then this" style sentences and the self-comforting shared mantra of "Okay" throughout, even though literally nothing about this situation is 'Okay' at all!) and stealthily becomes more and more allegorical in nature until it is about the path we take through our lives that defines us, surrounding apocalypse or not!

Or rather, perhaps the nebulous apocalypse is forever occurring in one form or another, rumbling on in our presents from the moment of our traumatic births to how we meet our eventual deaths. To pay heed to the hows or whys of what created the specific situation in this world is as unimportant to our unnamed father and son travellers on the road (of life) as it is to the flock of birds the father sees at one point early on in the book, and then no more birds appear again (which is bookened by the paragraph about the mysterious trout at the very end, which expands our tiny human story out into life cycles of all beings). Instead it is about the archetypal figures of 'father' and 'son' (and even briefly 'mother') and how they are left to travel this stripped back vision of the American landscape.

For the majority of the book there is the goal of following the road to the coast, where presumably everything will be 'okay'. It gives a motivation for the characters to press onward through the setpieces of finding the cannibal house or the fully stocked underground shelter, etc. All of which are suspiciously serendipitiously placed (almost as if structured that way by an author :-k ) to provide a cautionary tale or save the characters from certain starvation at the last possible moment. This is kind of the 'problem' that always has to be wrestled with in post-apocalypse stories - there is only really one inevitable end to these stories, and anything that postpones or prolongs that ending, even tenuously, can come to seem like an extremely obvious deux ex machina moment of providing the characters with just enough to keep them going on their journey. The Road magnificently eases into this sense of unease and growing awareness of the utter bleakness and purposelessness of wandering at the end of everything and then actively brings up this issue in the final section of the book (or even as early as mid-way through with the interlude with the old man who understands the existential nothingness of the road. Or even earlier with the remembrance of the wife's suicide in the face of the end of all things, and with not even a husband and son being enough of a reason to hold her back from ending things early on her own terms) with such blunt and direct prose of the father to his son (and even himself) about how they have always been lucky on the road (and that sometimes the man wishes they were not so lucky, so that it would all have ended sooner) that it shows that McCarthy is well aware of that issue and is tackling it head on.

The journey to the coast is already quite a long shot even at the beginning of the story but it comes to seem more and more of a delusion as things progress, until the audacious final last quater of the book where they reach the coast and then... what then? There's nothing there and no redemption or community waiting to greet our father and son at the end of the road and so they aimlessly wander the shoreline (which strongly reminded me - major spoiler - of the Man-Ape at the end of the 1988 Missing Link film and the final heart-breakingly blunt Michael Gambon voiceover which closes out the character's story, and that of his entire race, whilst the Man-Ape sits on the shore in the twilight and the film fades to black) until they just start wandering down the coast further until the father inevitably has to end up being wounded in a fight and succumbs to the illness that has been dogging him throughout.

But whilst the 'plot' of The Road is kind of a big McGuffin, that allows for the allegory to grow and take over instead. The whole idea of the man being constantly alert to the danger posed by other people (and frequently proven correct in that wariness in the few encounters peppered throughout the journey) and wanting to protect his son and for them to be the 'Good Guys', or carrying the fire for what remains of human morality and dignity is an admirable survival tactic for most of the story, but eventually itself beautifully builds up to suggest at our father figure being flawed in constantly keeping the boy away from others who potentially might be 'Good Guys' themselves. The father is so protective he is stifling the boy from the horrors of the world whilst the boy himself, even in this brutally bleak environment, is wanting to face the world that he has been born into and interact with others. Ironically the father trying to protect his son, whilst recklessly putting himself in danger or missing the signs of danger in places like the cannibal house, leads his son into becoming anxious himself at points. We mostly are told this story through the father's perspective but it eventually becomes clear that the son is (inevitably) growing away from the father and does not have to be protected from the sight of corpses, or eventually the state of the world entire. Which is something that hurts the father deeply - that he cannot protect his son's innocence from being sullied by encounters with the world - but which is the thing that eventually provides the one spark of light in the darkness of this story: that we are seeing the end of the world through the perspective of someone who existed pre-apocalypse and can remember what the world 'used to' be like and how things were 'supposed to be', and is wandering through the ruins of his shattered civilisation. Whilst by contrast the boy, who was pointedly born in the days after the initial disaster occurred, has only known this destroyed and devastated world, but in only knowing the way that the world is, rather than mourning how it used to be, this is now his world and his civilisation. It might be nothing but ruins to someone from an earlier era, but this is the legacy the boy has to live his own life within, and make out of it what life he can.

So near to the end of the story it comes to feel as if the father is holding the son back through his paradoxical trek to find something (other people? other communities?) but then being too suspicious and afraid of other people and what they may do to him, and especially his son, to ever treat the other people that they encounter on the road as fellow travellers like himself. We get the boy seeing a brief glimpse of another boy in the city near the beginning, only for the father to immediately drag him away for fear of other people who will come (which gets beautifully called back to in their final exchange on the father's death bed), and the old man on the road who the boy wants to help but the father teaches the lesson that they have to leave him behind. Once the father dies at the very end of the story that kind of tragically liberates the boy (though liberates together with a kind of 'transubstantiation' of his father from literal to a voice in the head that he will always be able to speak to) to now interact with strangers and, in an example of that 'luck' that has always been on their side, he encounters a 'good' family who take him in.
____

I really love the structure of the story, with its bookending speeches that comment so directly on each other that I was flicking between them that was so powerfully moving on being called back to - the wife, who only exists in flashback memories, very near the beginning of the story bluntly stating that she is going to commit suicide rather than wait to be raped and murdered in this new world, and that if it wasn't for the man that she would have made sure to take the boy with her too whilst the man begs her not to for the son's sake at least, contrasts extremely movingly with the dying father at the end of the story telling his son to keep going "because you don't know what might be down the road" and that whilst it is the end for him refuses his son's pleas to not leave him alone in the world and take him with him, this coming after having treated the gun with its single life-ending bullet as a fetish object for the entire story as if it was another child to take care of, apologising for his weakness and saying that "I can't. I can't hold my dead son in my arms. I thought I could but I can't". The father abandons the son as much as the mother did, but the contrast is that rather than the "coldness of it being her final gift" to them both; the father begs for his son to continue to "carry the fire" within him, of continued human life, into this future, no matter how bleak things appear.

I love the contrasting approaches to the major theme being between blunt suicide and continuing onward even though all seems hopeless as being kind of two sides of the same coin - suicide removes the possibility of any kind of luck or serendipity in the future from occurring, just the blunt full stop of death, which in the wife's speech seems horrifically callous and cruel to those she is leaving behind, but could also be seen as the only response to a world which offers no hope for anything but despair upon despair. Whilst the father's pushing forward down the road come what may seems like heroic tenacity but eventually in its questions of "for what?", "to where?", "why?" reveals it to be its own delusional response to a horrifically bleak world that offers no hope. In contrast to the wife saying that she would have killed the son before herself to spare him the suffering, is the father forcing his son on a starvation-beset trek through the landscape cruelly brutal on his child in a different way? But in the end aren't we all just on our own journey through our forefather's overly idealistic plans for the future that never entirely came to fruition?

That also turns all the supporting characters into representatives of the father and son themselves - the wife and husband's duelling philosophies is one, but also the boy briefly glimpsed in the city is kind of the son's doppleganger, and the old man on the road who exists only in the present moment is the father's equivalent doppleganger too. The father does not recognise this but it feels that the son does and this is part of what upsets him so much about having to abandon these characters in the road on top of just the boy wanting to interact with people. It's all a preparation for the final parting.
___

Whilst I have not yet seen the 2009 film version of this, The Road seems as if it has been highly influential on other works too - The Last of Us videogame and subsequent television series is basically the same structure of a man and child roaming the post-apocalypse. Although having read The Road shows that The Last of Us is a lot more toned down into an 'entertainment piece' than the bleak existential brutality of The Road: Joel in The Last of Us might get an equivalent scene of falling ill and forcing the young person to have to take care of the adult for a while but he does survive the entirety of his story (at least until the sequel!) and the game and series has a lot more emphasis on Walking Dead-style community interactions rather than the existential 'figures in a landscape' bleakness of The Road.

And I now have a suspicion that the Ukrainian film Homeward is doing the exact same allegorical father-son thing during its beach-set climax. Which is the best part of that film but unfortunately much of the preceding film is a bit too contrived. And now knowing that there is seemingly an entire film that does the best part of Homeward for its entire duration may now make it redundant! But I'll have to dig The Road out of my to watch pile to confirm if that is the case!

And I heartily second the comments from earlier in the thread about Haneke's Time of the Wolf making for a great companion piece to The Road as well. The other comparison that comes to mind would be to Sokurov's films, particularly the parent-child diptych of Mother and Son/Father and Son, which feel very similar themed.
___
EDIT: I was thinking that the main question I am left with by this story is at what point the boy is going to realise that all but one of the bullets in that gun are fakes to make it appear more deadly than it is! Hopefully before a situation where he has to use it! Although the father's hand whittled bullets could become their own mementos in themselves.