The Road (Wednesday, November 25, 2009) (170)

I'm sure it's really hard to make a movie based on a Pulitzer Prize winning novel. And Cormac McCarthy's The Road is not an easy book to adapt. There is not much of a story to it. A man and his son are on an journey on foot in some post-apocalyptic hell-scape from nowhere in particular to some beach far, far away. Along the way, they encounter a bunch of people who want to kill them, rob them, rape them or eat them. This is a world where suicide is a real option for conscious people, an escape from the terrible bleakness of their lives.

The film by Aussie director John Hillcoat (don't worry, I've never heard of him either) gets this bleakness really well, but that's about all it captures from the book. It is mostly bloodless and boring and never captures the gist of the book.

When dealing with a post-apocalyptic narrative, you can either show how the world ended or just accept that it did end and move on from there. Zombieland recently did this beautifully, simply showing us that at some point in time, zombies took over the world leaving sentient beings to fend for themselves. This film, however tries to explain what happened to lead to where we are now. It suggests that most life on earth died due to some environmental disaster similar to global warming. We see several flashbacks of the man's life with his loving wife before everything went bad, and at different points, characters talk about what happened.

Worst of all, there are terrible voice-overs by the man (From the future? From another dimension? Speaking directly to us?) explaining what he's feeling at different moments. Voice-overs are almost always bad and ill-conceived - I think in most cases they're a sign of lazy filmmaking. It's the director and writer being unable to show us what is happening or what has occurred and needing to tell us directly. I think the point here is to have the man speak in voice overs what the narrator of the book would be telling us - but the narrator of the book was never so blunt or inartful. It just feels ham handed and annoying here.

There is some really shamefully bad directing here. For example, in one sequence they look at a map showing an eastern coast (possibly the Texas gulf coast) and the man tells the boy that they will go to the coast and walk south. Yet, once they get to the beach and continue south, the water is on their right side - meaning it's a western coast. This is basic stuff and bad to get wrong. Either they should get a different map or set up the shot from the other direction so the directional orientation is correct.

But the poor job doesn't stop there for Hillcoat. He manages to get product placement into a movie about the end of the world showing people eating Cheetos and drinking Vitamin Water and Coke. Really?! Vitamin Water survives as long as cockroaches? Really? (I shouldn't get into it, but it is curious to me that the only black man in the film is also a pitiful robber. I'm sure Hillcoat is not racist, but it is curious how almost everybody who survives in this world is white - and almost all of them is treated with more respect.)

The adaptation of the novel by Joe Penhall (again, I don't know him) has so many holes in it, but I think the worst is the way the boy comes out. From what we see, he was born into this world, yet now, around age 8 or 10 or so, he is totally unable to cope with his surroundings.

I would think that children who grow up in certain situations learn to adapt to those situations and take them as a matter of fact in their lives. This boy, however, seems to have grown up in our world and doesn't understand basics of his own (for instance, when you're hiding from cannibals, don't make noise). At one point, the man makes a comment about a Christmas tree to his son - but I can't imagine that the kid has any idea of what a holiday is, let alone what Christmas is. This feels like it was written for our benefit rather than the boy's. This is very sloppy.

Overall, the film is sentimental and boring. I would have much preferred a gritty, scaled-down story rather than the plodding narrative we get here. In the novel, the man and boy are two characters who seem to represent types - they're rather picked-at-random. Their story feels rather universal in the greater scheme of this universe. Here, however, the man and boy are people that we are supposed to care about for their individuality and humanity. This approach might be more appealing to film-going audiences, but I think it misses a big part of the story.

Stars: 1 of 4