The Road (***1/4)

What’s the minimum quality of life that would make it worth living? Are other people necessary? Are material goods? Is a home? Are trees and plants and animals? This fine adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer-winning novel, set in a world in which all of these things have become scarcities, implicitly asks these questions. It is essentially a two-person drama. A bearded, bedraggled Viggo Mortenson plays the father, and Kodi Smit-Mcphee the son. Charlize Theron is the mother, but only in flashback scenes. It takes us awhile to find out what happened to her, but it seems likely to have been similar to the fate of most of humanity.

It is about ten years after the catastrophe (and the boy’s birth), and nearly all life has died out. The world grows colder. Conditions favor the ruthless, and the decent people left suspect each other, but mostly the movie stays focused on the father and the son. Of the nature of the disaster, or what happened at the time, and so forth, we know only enough to justify the story. This lack of explanation may frustrate if a science-fiction sort of experience is desired. This is not that sort of film. Nor is it like the Mad Max or Resident Evil movies, thrillers that do share the vision of a more brutal, post-apocalyptic future. Instead, this is a psychological drama about a man trying to teach his son both decency and survival skills, which at times come into conflict. “Are we the good guys?” asks the boy, wanting assurance.

There are a couple of harrowing scenes in which the travelers come upon the dead and the depraved, but the most tension-filled are the ones like that in which the man, holding the gun with its last two bullets, instructs his son on how to commit suicide should they find themselves in an untenable situation. There’s a lot of danger, but not much action. In some ways it’s even more spare than No Country for Old Men, the last version of a McCarthy novel. There’s an (intentional) monotony to the visuals, and the flashbacks present themselves as oases of saturated color in a film director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) has otherwise shot in dull gray. Yet for all its bleakness, the subject remains the preservation of hope in a seemingly hopeless world.

IMDB link

viewed 11/15/09 at Prince [PFS screening] and reviewed 11/15/09