A Compelling, Haunting Adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Novel
The Road (2009) is a powerful father-son tale and contains one of the best performances by a child actor ever captured on film. The movie is a bleak post-apocalyptic drama faithfully adapted from Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize and was an Oprah Winfrey selection.
The story takes place several years after some unspecified catastrophe befell the world. The skies are always gray and rainy, and the ground is barren. There are few human survivors, and towns and most rural houses lie abandoned and in ruins. The traveler can go for days without encountering anyone.
A father-son pair walk through this desolate world, hoping to find a better life. Their names are never given in the film, and the credits refer to them simply as Man (Viggo Mortensen) and Boy (11-year-old Kodi Smit-McPhee in a superb performance). They scavenge for old canned goods and must avoid savage cannibals.
The film is fundamentally about how the Man struggles to preserve his humanity under these extreme circumstances and how he works to instill a sense of morality in his young son. While The Road is emotionally downbeat for almost its entire running time, it ends on a hopeful note.
The acting is topnotch throughout, including that in supporting roles played by Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce and Robert Duvall.
Supplementary Materials
The Road DVD provides a worthwhile feature-length audio commentary by director John Hillcoat. He claims that 80 percent of the film was shot outside, and there were 50 locations. Key locations were Mount St. Helens and post-Katrina New Orleans, although much of the movie was shot in Pennsylvania and some in Oregon. Hillcoat says that although he has been accused of product promotion in the cola-drinking scene, the fact is that corporations wanted nothing to do with the film because of the cannibalism. He also states he insisted that the scene in the novel where a baby is roasted on a spit be filmed, but he decided not to use it in the finished movie.
The DVD also contains a 14-minute making-of that gives you the opportunity of hearing from the director, the screenwriter (Joe Penhall) and the principal members of the cast. Finally, there are four deleted scenes and an extended one, and these have a total runtime of about 6 1/2 minutes.
DVD Release Date: May 25, 2010
Feature Film Runtime: 1 hour 51 minutes
MPAA Rating: R for Some Violence, Disturbing Images and Language