the road movie review reddit

Walking from here to anywhere through nowhere, and worse

Note: I first saw “The Road” in September at the Toronto Film Festival, as one of eight films I saw in three days. I wrote a draft of a review at the time and sent it. That review accidentally found its way into sight in October, long before the film was scheduled to open. I yanked it offline as quickly as I could.

I saw the movie a second time at a press screening on Oct. 27 in Chicago. I see festival films again whenever I have the chance. I find the second viewing makes the good ones better, and the bad ones worse. Such is the case with “The Road.”

“The Road” evokes the images and the characters of Cormac McCarthy ‘s novel. It is powerful, but for me lacks the same core of emotional feeling. I’m not sure this is any fault of the filmmakers. The novel itself would not be successful if it were limited to its characters and images. Its effect comes above all through McCarthy’s prose. It is the same with all of McCarthy’s work, but especially this one, because his dialogue is so restrained, less baroque than usual.

The story is straightforward: America has been devastated. Habitations have been destroyed or abandoned, vegetation is dying, crops have failed, the infrastructure of civilization has disappeared. This has happened in such recent memory that even The Boy , so young, was born into a healthy world. No reason is given for this destruction, perhaps because no reason would be adequate. McCarthy evokes the general apprehension of post-9/11. The Boy and The Man make their way toward the sea, perhaps for no better reason than that sea has always been the direction of hope in this country.

The surviving population has been reduced to savage survivalists, making slaves of the weaker, possibly using them as food. We’ve always done that, employing beef cattle, for example, to do the grazing on acres of pasture so we can consume the concentrated calories of their labor. In a land where food is scarce, wanderers seek out canned goods and fear their own bodies will perform this work for the cannibals.

Although we read of those who stockpile guns and ammunition for an apocalypse, weapon stores on the Road have dwindled down. The Man has a gun with two remaining bullets. He is a wary traveler, suspecting everyone he sees. He and The Boy are transporting a few possessions in a grocery cart. He encourages his son to keep walking, but holds out little hope for the end of their journey.

I am not sure the characters could be played better, or differently. Viggo Mortensen portrays The Man as dogged and stubborn, determined to protect his boy. Kodi Smit-McPhee is convincing as a child stunned by destruction, depending on his father in a world where it must be clear to him that any man can die in an instant. The movie resists any tendency toward making the child cute, or the two of them heartwarming.

Flashback scenes star Charlize Theron as the wife and mother of the two in earlier, sunnier days. These sequences show the marriage as failing, and these memories haunt The Man. I’m not sure what relevance this subplot has to the film as a whole; a marriage happy or sad — isn’t it much the same in this new world? It has a lot of relevance, however, to The Man and The Boy. In times of utter devastation, memories are what we cling to.

The external events of the novel have been boldly solved, and this is an awesome production. But McCarthy’s prose has the uncanny ability to convey more than dialogue and incident. It’s as dense as poetry. It is more spare in The Road than in a more ornate work like Suttree ; in The Road, it is as evocative in the way Samuel Beckett is. If it were not, “The Road” might be just another film of sci-fi apocalypse. It’s all too easy to imagine how this material could be vulgarized, as Richard Matheson’s novel was in the 2007 version of “ I Am Legend .”

How could the director and writer, John Hillcoat and Joe Penhall , have summoned the strength of McCarthy’s writing? Could they have used more stylized visuals, instead of relentless realism? A grainy black-and-white look to suggest severely limited resources? I have no idea. Perhaps McCarthy, like Faulkner, is all but unfilmable.

The one great film of his work is the Coens’ “ No Country for Old Men ,” but it began with an extraordinary character and surrounded him with others. The Road is not fertile soil, providing a world with life draining from it. McCarthy’s greatest novels are Suttree and Blood Meridian. The second, set in the Old West, is about a fearsome, bald, skeletal man named Judge Holden, who is implacable in his desire to inflict suffering and death. (“Blood Meridian” is being prepared by Todd Field , director of “ In the Bedroom .”)

Hillcoat’s earlier film, “ The Proposition ” (2005), written by Nick Cave , seems almost McCarthy-like. Something in McCarthy’s work draws Hillcoat to it, and you must be a brave director to let that happen. Writing this, I realize few audience members can be expected to have read The Road, even though it was a selection of Oprah’s Book Club. Fewer still will have read McCarthy’s other works.

I’ve been saying for years that a film critic must review the film before him, and not how “faithful” the film is to the book — as if we’re married to the book, and somehow screen adaptation is adultery. I realize my own fault is in being so very familiar with Cormac McCarthy. That may affect my ability to view any film adaptation of his work afresh. When I know a novel is bring filmed, I make it a point to not read the book. Yet I am grateful for having read McCarthy’s.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

• Charlize Theron as Wife
• Robert Duvall as Old Man
• Kodi Smit-McPhee as The Boy
• Viggo Mortensen as The Man
• Guy Pearce as The Veteran

Based on the novel by

• Cormac McCarthy
• Joe Penhall

Directed by

• John Hillcoat

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The Road Reviews

While The Road is not without its impressive aspects, it has not efficiently pulled taut the slack created by the loss of McCarthy’s commanding prose. And so, it is hard to avoid the sense that it needn’t have been made at all.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 7, 2024

Plan to see it twice—once to familiarize yourself with its unconventional, non-commercial method of storytelling, and a second time that allows you to submerge into the material, to appreciate how stunningly composed it is.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 30, 2023

While such a depressing, disturbing and disquieting conceit will not be everyone's ideal of almost two hours entertainment, The Road is one of the great films of the 21st century.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | May 31, 2023

I still recommend The Road; just keep in mind that this is Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic tale, not Richard Matheson's.

Full Review | Sep 13, 2022

One of the more impressive displays of solemn storytelling and superb acting seen this year.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Nov 29, 2020

The sensation this harrowing film evokes in the viewer is one that feels far more appropriate for a story dealing with catastrophe - gut-clenching dread.

Full Review | Nov 26, 2020

Somehow I am captivated by what I see in 'The Road', John Hillcoat's post-apocalyptic drama adapted from Cormac McCarthy's work. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Aug 5, 2020

The opposite of escapist entertainment, this rugged and wearing screen experience is tough, uncompromising stuff.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 26, 2020

The Road may appear - at face value at least - to be a muted, subdued and frankly rather quiet approximation of an Apocalypse. But it's precisely this that gives it so much power.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 29, 2019

One of the more interesting films to come out in 2009.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 16, 2019

Hillcoat and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe have successfully recreated the barren, grey, burnt out landscape... Mortensen is admirable as the man journeying with his son and it's bleak in a way that Hollywood rarely dares to be.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 4, 2018

I cannot say how faithful this is but, having read other McCarthy books, would say the novel probably repaid your attention with its astonishing prose. This, though, puts you through the wringer, but doesn't repay you in any way.

Full Review | Aug 30, 2018

It's fascinating to see the world become an empty vessel, but all The Road pours back into it are hollow truisms.

Full Review | May 23, 2018

It wasn't fascinating at all. The movie looked like it cost $500 to make, excluding actors' salaries, which were worth another $500.

Full Review | Jan 16, 2018

I'm not asking for the end of the world to be a thrill-ride, but maybe it could have been less of a meretricious trudge.

Full Review | Nov 27, 2017

Even with the brief cameos by Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce, The Road doesn't meet expectations.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Sep 11, 2017

The Road is a murky harbinger of our future, but perhaps more urgently, a cautionary tale clearly reflecting our present.

Full Review | Aug 8, 2017

A remarkable, haunting picture worth multiple viewings.

Full Review | Sep 24, 2014

The Road is one of the year's strongest dramas. But it's no picnic, to say the least.

Full Review | Mar 11, 2014

There's about as much action as My Dinner With Andre.

Full Review | Feb 17, 2014

The Road Review

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Almost since the beginning of man, we as humans have imagined what the end of the world would be like. Often in film it is depicted either as a pandemic like in “Children of Men,” an alien invasion like “Independence Day,” a cybernetic revolt like “The Matrix,” an ecological catastrophe like “The Day After Tomorrow,” biologically altered humans as depicted in “I Am Legend” or because of a man made war like in “Escape From New York.” However, in “ The Road ,” refreshingly, the reason for the post-apocalyptic setting is never revealed and honestly, it isn’t missed. I never once thought, “What is happening here?” because the main story is so powerful. Rather than focusing on the catastrophe the filmmaker smartly chooses to concentrate on the very human story of a father and son, and their attempt at survival in a barren wasteland. Everything that comes before it takes a back seat to the drama of the main story and it serves the film well, making for powerful and suspenseful cinema.

Based on the book of the same name by “No Country For Old Men” author Cormac McCarthy, the film centers on an unnamed father, the always-impressive Viggo Mortensen, his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and their struggle to survive after an unspecified apocalypse. As they make their way toward the coast searching for food, shelter and safety they encounter several bands of cannibals and other desperate gangs looking to steal valuables and eat the boy. This causes the father and his son to trust no one, even those with good intentions, in order to protect them selves and survive. As the hopeless journey continues across the barren landscapes, with scarce shelter and few resources available to them, the two become closer than ever without forgetting the loved ones they’ve lost. Flashbacks show us events leading up to the catastrophe and Charlize Theron, in another excellent performance, plays the mother and wife to our two heroes who couldn’t make it on the journey. In the end, we realize the father was preparing his son for an inevitable future without him and the hard life that lays ahead for the boy in this strange new world.

This movie works because at the heart of it, it is a father and son story, plain and simple. It works on an emotional level that is very striking. What would you do if the world was ending and there was no food available? Would you eat bugs? Would you eat another person? What would you do and how would you protect your family? What lengths would you go to, to insure safety for you family? These are important social questions yet the film is entertainingly wrapped up in this post-apocalyptic journey film. The cannibals and other rarely seen villains are cleverly used, only appearing at the height of the drama, which gives the audience a very unsettling feeling. We can feel the fear of these people when the gangs appear and it eventually leads you to fear everyone we encounter in the film. Throughout the movie the father tells his son that they are “the good guys” and that’s why they won’t eat people yet you begin to question just what makes someone “a good guy.” Given the circumstance, who wouldn’t do everything in their power to make sure they survive? But where is the line and how do you keep yourself from crossing it? These are some of the questions that the film so beautiful asks and artfully refuses to answer. We are left to make up our own minds about what ultimately happens but I will say that the end is very satisfying and it makes you rethink a lot of what you had seen earlier in the film.

Following his brilliant work in both David Cronenberg’s “A History Of Violence” and “Eastern Promises,” Mortensen gives a performance just as mind-blowing and should earn him a great deal of Oscar-buzz this season. The veteran actor who is also a father himself, clearly had a strong feeling about the character and an emotional connection to the material that shines through in the part. If Mortensen wasn’t already considered one of the best acting movie stars around, then this should seal the deal. Theron is excellent showing a mother’s desperation and conveying the emotions of a woman who cares for her family but has literally given up all hope. But without Smit-McPhee’s performance working off of Mortensen the film wouldn’t work. For such a young actor to pull off that role was impressive. Not only could he carry his own opposite Mortensen but also it is his emotional innocents that are the audience’s window inside of this world. Garret Dillahunt, who has made a name for himself working on some of the best shows on television, gives a very creepy performance as a hillbilly in one scene and Michael K. Williams from “The Wire” is equally impressive in his role. The legendary Robert Duvall also pops up as does Guy Pearce and both actors are a pleasure, as always, to watch.

The film, much like “Children Of Men,” sets the tone perfectly introducing us to this believably bleak future. Director John Hillcoat, who’s last film was the equally astonishing “The Proposition,” does an amazing job creating this dismally bleak world with some stunning camera work and breath taking imagery. Musician Nick Cave, who wrote “The Proposition,” re-teams with Hillcoat, this time composing the music, which helps set the tone of the film and is both haunting and moving. The script, based on the novel, is well written by Joe Penhall and keeps the suspense and drama moving. The pacing at times makes you feel like you’re in a Zombie movie without the Zombies but that just adds to the sense of urgency for these characters. In the end, “ The Road ” is a touching, moving and heartfelt film about a father preparing his son for the harsh realities of life set to a post-apocalyptic background. The movie transcends all genres and sends a powerful message about family and the human race’s need for survival.

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Eye For Film >> Movies >> The Road (2009) Film Review

Reviewed by: Anton Bitel

About a third of the way through Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel The Road, the two main characters cautiously watch a passing caravan, with colourfully decorated warriors in the front, then harnessed slaves pulling carts piled with the material spoils of war, then the women, and lastly a 'supplementary consort' of yoked catamites.

This is one of only a very few episodes from the Pulitzer Prize-winning book that has not found its way into Joe Penhall's otherwise faithful screen adaptation, and the reason is obvious. On the page, this wagon train is positively terrifying, but on screen it would bring McCarthy's post-apocalyptic vision a little too close to the well-charted (and now cheesy) territories of Mad Max . John Hillcoat's The Road, you see, is pure, stripped-down bleakness, both in the desaturated drabness of its appearance and in the last-days essentialism of its themes. This is an America that has become no country for men or women of any age, and certainly no place for the leather-bound heroics of a Road Warrior.

After an undefined event (nuclear assault? cosmic collision? environmental catastrophe? it hardly matters any more), the sky has turned ash-grey, animals and plants have died, the cities have burned down, and in a desperate scramble for ever dwindling supplies of food and fuel, human survivors have turned on themselves.

Through this desolate landscape, a man (Viggo Mortensen) and his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) flee the increasing cold of the north and their memories of the boy's now dead mother (Charlize Theron) for whatever might await them at the coast. Pushing their few belongings in a shopping cart, sleeping rough, scavenging for anything edible, and trying to avoid danger (be it earthquakes or other travelers), the duo seeks the end of the road while bearing grim witness to the end of days – and yet, in their struggles and suffering, in their dreams of the past and fears for the future, in their harrowing decisions and occasional acts of kindness, and in their abiding love for one another whatever happens, they also come to define, recognise and maintain their own fragile humanity, 'carrying the fire' where there is otherwise nothing but darkness all about.

Cinema often pairs fathers and sons in extremis to test (or at least dramatise) notions of identity and heritage – just think Lone Wolf and Cub in the Babycart series, Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars trilogy, Michael Sullivan and Michael Sullivan Jr in Road To Perdition or Romulus and Raimond (also played by Smit McPhee) in Romulus, My Father . In The Road, however, the father and son do not even get the specificity of names. They are cyphers for all our hopes and anxieties, traveling the long genetic/historic road to nowhere.

A key moment comes when Man and Boy are shown sitting side by side on the sand, staring out to sea, and the boy asks: "What's on the other side?" In the world Hillcoat has realised with such beautiful, awful spareness, everything (including the boy's question) comes to resonate with a metaphysical, even theological quality. The boy seems to be reflecting upon not only the unseen lands across the Atlantic, but also a different kind of beyond where he hopes one day to be reunited with his mother. Of course, as the two sit on the beach contemplating the unknown eternity before them, they are also staring out at us in the cinema, leaving us to ponder how similar a road we all travel, measured in love and loss, hope and despair, faith and suspicion, civilisation and bestiality - and ending, for each and every one of us, in exactly the same place.

Director: John Hillcoat

Writer: Joe Penhall, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy

Starring: Charlize Theron, Viggo Mortensen, Garret Dillahunt, Guy Pearce, Robert Duvall, Molly Parker, Michael K. Williams, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Brenna Roth, Bob Jennings, Jeremy Ambler, David August Lindauer, Jack Erdie, Nick Pasqual, Jared Pfennigwerth

Runtime: 119 minutes

Country: US

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The road — film review.

In "The Road," director John Hillcoat has performed an admirable job of bringing Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the screen as an intact and haunting tale.

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Venice Film Festival — Competition

VENICE — In “The Road,” director John Hillcoat has performed an admirable job of bringing Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the screen as an intact and haunting tale, even at the cost of sacrificing color, big scenes and standard Hollywood imagery of post-apocalyptic America.

Shot through with a bleak intensity and pessimism that offers little hope for a better tomorrow, the film is more suitable to critical appreciation than to attracting huge audiences though topliners Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron will attract initial business.

The screenplay by Joe Penhall takes a very different tack from end-of-the-worlders like “Children of Men,” choosing rigorous, low-key realism over special effects. The story is told largely through flashbacks, which are the memories of a father (Mortensen) struggling for survival on the road with his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee).

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Ten years have passed since a series of terrible earthquakes and fires have destroyed the world. These spectacular catastrophes are barely glimpsed onscreen, however. The film unfolds as an anguishing forced march in which the father tries to protect the boy and lead them south, to a warmer climate where life may still be possible.

No animals and few men are left in this dying, gray world where no vegetation grows and food stocks have been used up long ago. Bundled in filthy coats, father and son trudge south with a shopping cart containing their few belongings. Hiding from bands of roving cannibals and forever on the brink of suicide, the only human thing that sustains them is the love they share.

Hillcoat and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe create a frighteningly barren world virtually devoid of color, where everything is covered with fine gray ash and even the sea has become gray. Occasional flashbacks to pre-disaster life offer momentary visual respites of color, music and warmth.

Theron, who is pregnant when the cataclysm occurs, appears here as an enigmatic figure both weak and strong, a realist who would prefer that the family save themselves from starvation by committing suicide, as many others have done. But there are only two bullets left in the gun. Her solitary leave-taking, waking out into the night, is a wrenching image.

In this kind of world, horror elements are there for the taking, but are kept in the background apart from one nightmarish scene in which father and son discover a lonely house in the woods. In the locked cellar are a dozen writhing, naked men and women with missing limbs — stock for a band of well-fed cannibals. The duo also makes a narrow escape from a roving gang of rifle-toting desperadoes aboard a huge truck, who appear out of nowhere Mad Max style.

Most of the film, however, describes the bond between the still-innocent boy and his weathered, dying father. The boy, several times imagined by his father to be an angel or a god, struggles to find values the adult is unable to give him.

“We’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys” is the maximum moral guidance Mortensen has to offer. They do shelter in a ruined church and meet a wizened old-timer named Ely (Robert Duvall) who issues prophetic warnings, but the absence of God, and therefore hope, is a given throughout the film.

Production: 2929 Prods., Chockstone Pictures, Dimension Films Sales: Film Nation Entertainment Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, Molly Parker, Garret Dillahunt Director: John Hillcoat Screenwriter: Joe Penhall Producers: Nick Wechsler, Paula Mae Schwartz, Steve Schwartz Executive producers: Todd Wagner, Mark Cuban, Marc Butan, Rudd Simmons Co-producers: Mike Upton, Erik Hodge Director of photography: Javier Aguirresarobe Production designer: Chris Kennedy Music: Nick Cave, Warren Ellis Costumes: Margot Wilson Editor: Joe Gregory

No rating, 112 minutes

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The road:5 differences between the movie and the book (& 5 things the movie got right).

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The Road is Cormac McCarthy's harrowing story of a Father and his son as they navigate a post-apocalyptic world, trying to survive. In 2009,  The Road was adapted into a movie with Viggo Mortenson and Sasha Butterfield as the leading stars with critics impressed by both the adaption and performances from the two.

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Overall, the cinematic adaptation is almost a direct translation of the book, something that rarely happens when books are converted into movies. However, there are a few subtle differences fans were quick to point out. With that, here are 5 key differences between The Road, the book and the film, and 5 things the movie got exactly right.

Difference: Flashbacks Vs. Dreams (The Mother)

Charlize Theron's performance as the Mother in The Road captured the hopelessness of humanity once the world began to tear itself apart. The difference between the version from the book and the movie is the way she is remembered. In the movie, the audience is given necessary context through flashbacks, moments before the apocalypse along with the Father grieving her death by fidgeting with his wedding ring.  In the book, the Mother is described through dreams rather than direct flashbacks, giving her existence a supernatural and ghostly feel rather than the tangible version of the character from the movie.

Related:  The Road's Tragic Ending Explained

Movie Did Right: Gun Instruction

One of the hardest scenes to watch from the cinematic adaption of The Road is the pistol use instruction scene. The Father knows that if they're caught by cannibals or marauders, they'll suffer every minute which is why he teaches the boy how to kill himself. With one bullet left in the chamber, the Father knows he'll use it on his son to spare him any suffering they might endure.

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As in the novel, the movie delivered a terrifying portrayal of this desperate moment. When all hope is lost, the only grace he can give his son is a quick death.

Difference: The Father's Final Resting Place (Woods vs. the beach)

The death of the Father was heartbreaking in the book. The movie made it borderline unbearable to watch. After taking an arrow to the leg, the Father's leg becomes infected and he continues to bleed out until his inevitable death. This is also on top of his respiratory illness, depicted through bloody coughing fits throughout the story. In the book, the man dies in the woods with his son after setting up a campsite for the night. In the movie, the Father bleeds out on the beach with the boy refusing to leave his body for three days. Though in the book, the boy also stays for three days, comprehending the fact he is alone and vulnerable.

Movie Did Right: The Musical Score

One element of McCarthy's story that separates itself from others is its purposeful lack of detail. The idea of the apocalypse is terrifying in itself, the rest is left up to the viewer with the narration from the story only guiding the reader along.

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The music from the cinematic adaption was spot-on, amplifying the sense of dread and hopelessness found in what's left of the world. It perfectly replicated the novel's atmosphere.

Difference: The Details of the Marauders

The marauders/cannibals are an unforgiving and vicious band of mindless monsters, enslaving men, women, and children as a means to survive. As savage as they are in the movie, they're even worse in the book. Cormac McCarthy describes the marauders dragging catamites behind their carriages and cars before skipping to some dialogue between the Father and Son.  The term catamite comes from Ancient Greece and was used to describe a young pubescent boy or girl (though it usually a boy) used for sexual desires. The difference between someone like a prostitute and a catamite is the level of degradation involved with the latter and often having them constantly available for harassment. It's obvious why this detail was omitted in the film, but it does make these horrors even worse.

Movie Did Right: Casting

Viggo Mortenson and Kodi Smit-McPhee were an unlikely match for but ended up blending perfectly throughout the film The two were the last remnants of hope with the boy's naive and innocent mind clashing with his experienced and cautious Father.

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These two actors captured these personalities perfectly and delivered a faithful cinematic depiction of the two's relationship from the book. Supporting performances from legendary actor Robert Duvall as Eli, Charlize Theron, and Guy Pierce gave the movie a touch of Hollywood fame for a guaranteed hit at the box office.

Difference: The Boat Scene

One scene discluded from the movie adaption is the boat scene which resulted in the Father finding the flare gun (which would come in handy later). The scene itself isn't integral to the plot but still noticeable for avid readers of the book. John Hillcoat and Joe Penhall, the two directors of the movie, deemed the scene unnecessary and instead moved on with the inevitable death of the Father.

Movie Did Right: Portrayal of the World

Cormac McCarthy's world after the apocalypse is a barren wasteland of burning trees, with sunlight hidden above the infinite layers of ash and soot. Director John Hillcoat did an amazing job ensuring McCarthy's vision came to fruition.

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There's a reason the movie was nominated for Best Cinematography. The entire 111 minutes is a moving canvas with dark, bleak colors, devoid of vegetation but hauntingly beautiful at the same time.

Difference: Spit-Roasted Newborn

Just by the title of this alone, you can understand how dark the world is in The Road . This scene was omitted from the film simply because of how twisted and horrible it was. In the book, the Father and Son hear a woman give birth to a newborn with two men helping her.

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In the morning, they find the newborn gutted and spit-roasted over a previously lit fire pit. It's sights like these that were deemed too much but would have added an entirely new layer of horror to the movie adaption.

Movie Did Right: The Dialogue

Cormac McCarthy relies on dialogue for plot progression and character development, with the latter being the heart and soul of the book. The conversations between the Father and Son reveal the last glimpses of humanity, hence the recurring phrase between the two: carrying the fire (inside of us).

With this, director John Hillcoat did everything in his power to rely on the same mechanics McCarthy used, the result being a masterfully written script.

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More from this title

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The Road Is the Most Important Movie of the Year

Originally published in the June 2009 issue

At one point in The Road, a moment that is never otherwise explained or referenced, the father and the son stare at a dead forest as it burns. The fire leers profanely from one edge of the screen to the other. Dense and hot, certainly loud, it's the sort of fire from which there is no safe distance. It feels like the two of them should get out of there. From the get-go, the father and son have moved. And yet now they stand there watching the fire, dazed, like two drunks gazing out the window of a Laundromat at a mushroom cloud.

Move, guys. Move.

Everything about the film seems disconnected in this way — shocky and post-traumatic. This is what happens: A father and a son walk from point A to point B through a desolate landscape. Cities are deserted. People-zombies, some of them hungry for human flesh, stare out from abandoned office buildings and sometimes hunt other people. It's always cloudy. Everything is dead. There is no color left in anything — not the people, not the plants, not the faces of mountains. Ruined, wrecked, used up — it is our world, consumed at its edges by fire, at its center by rot.

Sounds awful, because it goddamned well is. But it's awful, too, as in full of awe. Awful as in you cannot avert your gaze. It's hard not to watch a fire.

When they do move, the father and the son progress through a quietly seething dream, a world at its end. When they run from danger, they clank and rustle and seem wetly destined to never get away. When the father grips the boy's mouth to quiet him, it is too rough. Rivers seem to be icy sloughs of poison. Yet they swim. They are a father and son. They carry two bullets. Anytime the man turns his back on the boy or separates from him, it feels — in a way that scary, apocalyptic movies often do — as if everything will end. But in those movies, the end never really comes. You know that going in, because generally those movies just flirt with the apocalypse, just offer a little look-see at a tidal wave or a nuclear blast.

The Road is no tease. It is a brilliantly directed adaptation of a beloved novel, a delicate and anachronistically loving look at the immodest and brutish end of us all. You want them to get there, you want them to get there, you want them to get there — and yet you do not want it, any of it, to end.

You should see it for the simplest of reasons: Because it is a good story. Not because it may be important. Not because it is unforgettable, unyielding. Not because it horrifies. Not because the score is creepily spiritual. Not because it is littered with small lines of dialogue you will remember later. Not because it contains warnings against our own demise. All of that is so. Don't see it just because you loved the book. The movie stands alone. Go see it because it's two small people set against the ugly backdrop of the world undone. A story without guarantees. In every moment — even the last one — you'll want to know what happens next, even if you can hardly stand to look. Because The Road is a story about the persistence of love between a father and a son, and in that way it's more like a remake of The Godfather than some echo of I Am Legend.

Only this one is different: You won't want to see this one twice.

Consider this little tick of time in the life of The Road, a movie that hundreds of thousands of the book's readers, millions even, are waiting for, if only to vet the film's bleak topography of the ruined nation against the skull carpet of their own imagination: It's the moment when the producer chooses a trailer, itself a defining document for the potential moviegoing nation. This takes place in the offices of the distributor, Dimension Films, and features the huffing presence of one Bob Weinstein, wearing the most wrinkled shirt in the history of modern office life, sitting in his infamous miasma of consternation and excitement, speaking about The Road, which had its release date pushed back one full year last November. Everyone involved — director, producer, screenwriter — says there was no secret agenda to that, no worry to be inferred, no doubt on anyone's part about the final product. The movie, which required more than two hundred visual effects to decolorize a landscape stripped of life, simply wasn't ready.

Weinstein acknowledges that loyal readers of Cormac McCarthy's book, which was published in 2006, are probably worried. He's sitting in a conference room in Manhattan, about to pop in a DVD containing two potential trailers. He seems to be figuring out how to talk about the film as he goes, fighting contrary tugs from some internal narrator, giving in only by the slenderest of degrees to the urge to mollify two, three, four different audiences.

First, he calls it a literate action movie. At one point he calls it a zombie movie. Then he starts talking about his kids. "When I had my kids, I was grateful. I was like, Now there's something other to think about than me," he says, and that word — me — echoes in the star chamber. "Every parent has that. You don't have to have kids. You're human. If you can't relate to this story, then check your humanity somewhere. I felt this whole relationship with this father and son. Yeah. And yet it was thrilling."

People like to see certain components in movies concerning the end of the world. Asteroids. Alien visitation. Angels. Nuclear war. Tidal waves. Climate change. Giant robots. They seem to like leather. And hopped-up cars. Appearances by God. Buildings blow up, cities fall, in real time. Villains, always villains. Snakes are always good. A beautiful woman. But The Road offers none of that. (Except the last one: Charlize Theron has a supporting role as the mother, breathing a little more fully than her character does in the book, solely as the face of despair.)

Plus, let's face it: The Road does not inherently seem like an asses-in-the-seats proposition. It is adapted from a lyric, repetitive little book, one written in a fashion that nods at classic narrative structure only in its final pages. A book that has found two sorts of readers: the fanatics, who can't put it down, and the frustrated, who find it so dark, blatantly literary, rhythmically voicey, and without hope that they can't turn past page 3. While that doesn't necessarily frame it as a problem movie, it does make things hard to describe in the familiar contours of an X -meets- Y movie pitch. It's fair to wonder whether The Road will become an unimportant footnote in the wake of a best seller. Happens all the time. The Bonfire of the Vanities. Angela's Ashes. And movies mangle literary books, too. They turn arty and inexplicably beloved literary titles — The English Patient or The Hours — into arty and pretty forgettable movies. Worse, bad movies routinely make important stories less important. Three years ago, Emilio Estevez single-handedly killed any resurgent interest in the accomplishments of Bobby Kennedy.

"We had a lot of pressure when I went after this book," says producer Nick Wechsler, who pursued and optioned the novel in June 2006, before it was published. "There were other people who made offers, but they weren't large, because they were afraid of the material, obviously. It's very dark stuff. I simply responded to the book. I had no idea that it was going to gain the momentum that it did, become that talked about, that it would win the Pulitzer, get on Oprah. All of a sudden, I could see this was very precious to people, that there was a kind of public trust associated with this book. And we felt incredible pressure on delivering the movie that we felt would be a valid adaptation."

When Wechsler entered the life of The Road, the movie, chances were taken, creating a new interpretative alchemy. He selected a relatively unknown Australian director, John Hillcoat, whose previous feature-film work began and ended with The Proposition, a smallish Australian western starring Guy Pearce — a decent third-shelf offering at Blockbuster right now. Hillcoat, in turn, hired dark-rocker Nick Cave to compose the score and sought out Joe Penhall, an award-winning but obscure Australian playwright living in London, to write the screenplay. They moved fast — Penhall and Hillcoat were working on the script even as the book's fervent readership coalesced.

It's clear that Wechsler was toying with expectations even then. "It's a very small bull's-eye, this movie. In all aspects of putting it together, you don't want an audience going into the theater thinking they know what the ride is going to be."

Whatever topical agenda people attach to this film — global warming, the fall of nationalism, the perils of consumption — it won't matter. It isn't a vision of the future at all. This is a vision of the end. Like: In the end, there's only one can of Coke. Coke is about to be forgotten. In a collapsing mall, the father digs a single can out of a toppled vending machine. It falls to the floor like a weighty and singular apple. The father opens it and offers it to the boy as a treat. The boy drinks and insists that the father have some, too. They are like that: generous and genuine, even with the last details of a time the boy has never known. But the father gives almost all of it to his son, who stops for a moment, then asks, "Because it's the only one I'll ever have, right?" In that moment, he realizes not only what he has lost, but why his father wants him to have the soda at all. You can see he likes the Coke, too.

"This was a book that was written in a time of prosperity, and we got involved with it in a time of prosperity," says Marc Butan of Mark Cuban's 2929 Productions, which produced the film. "The lens that everyone is viewing through these days is very different. You look at it now and it has a different subtext. It's a count-your-blessings thing now."

Cormac McCarthy fathered a son as an old man, and this story is an ode to a ticking clock, to the diminishment of time, to last chances. Last chance to parent. Last chance to warn, to train, to prepare. The father fights to teach. And the father teaches the boy to fight. In the movie's first teaching moment, the father shows his son where to shoot himself in the head should it come to that. With the gun loaded. It is perhaps the movie's only lurid turn, a moment that, like almost every moment in the movie, appears in the book as well. By the time it occurs, it is understood to be a gesture of necessity. There they are, citizens of a kind of now, bad teeth and all, pallid, filthy, damp to the bone, at their end, and whether you've read the book or not, the sight of it makes you seize.

"It's a love story," Hillcoat says. "So it moves you in a way that is quite unexpected."

It is a love story. But to be clear, it's a love story about a father and a son hauling ass to keep from being eaten by small bands of flannel-shirted cannibals.

It's also a purposefully color-bare apologue of man and boy. The man is played by Viggo Mortensen, and he's in virtually every frame. "The interesting thing about picking an actor for a movie is, you want to try to surpass the audience's knowledge or expectations of what that actor's about," Hillcoat says. "We took a shot with Viggo as opposed to bigger box-office stars. In large part, he's the right choice because, as good as he is, he's still untapped." Mortensen is brilliant in insinuating the father's pain and communicating the hints of loss and his resistance to the inevitable. Burnt and sinewy in each scene, he registers a liquid panic in every glance at the woods and a sort of angry regret in every peek at the boy. Mortensen is a different filthy man in each function of fatherhood. You recognize them all, without voice-over, without undue exposition. He still cares. And it hurts more than ever to care.

Twelve-year-old Kodi Smit-McPhee is beautiful and wretched, luminous and somehow smaller than his age as the boy. But he's full-blown in the part, his character concerned, like all boys, with the contents of his pockets, naturally curious about the few others they encounter — an old man, an elusive child, a thief, a dog barking at the unseen end of a collapsed mall. Mortensen and Smit-McPhee wrestle for control like any father and son — in dealing with strangers, in figuring out who's a good guy and who's a bad guy, in matters of privacy, and in the divergent ways they treat others. Elemental shit, really. Just some simple old-world parenting, long before people harvested human limbs for Sunday dinner.

The third major cast member of The Road is the setting itself, the world. The film's locations were perhaps the least well-kept secrets in the marketplace of prerelease Web sites about the movie. "Initially we were talking about [filming in] Australia or Iceland," Hillcoat says. "But all of our research took us to looking at images of events like Mount St. Helens, the volcanoes in the Philippines, Hiroshima, Katrina, a set of man-made and natural disasters that have been heavily photographed and filmed. My production designer, sitting in the countryside in Victoria, Australia, found eight miles of abandoned freeway in Pennsylvania on Google Earth, which gave us those dark tunnels. We deliberately used America's real apocalyptic zones. We went to New Orleans to shoot our interior shots in a ruined shopping mall in post-Katrina New Orleans. We used the strip mines in western Pennsylvania. Even billowing clouds in the background of one scene come from 9/11.

"When they pass through a city, there's a shot of two ships sitting on a freeway that looks like a visual effect. That is an actual IMAX 70mm shot taken days after Katrina. We had to doctor the image, grunge it up, make it more toxic, set it into our world, but these places were not hard to find. There's a fair amount of devastation already in the American landscape."

You don't recognize these presences as some timely message from our near past, as heralds of warning. Like the father and son, the scenes — the forgotten 18-wheeler jackknifed on a freeway bridge, the gas stations littered with useless contraptions, the sinister farmhouses, the sheds with their hand tools piled like ancient contrivances — all of it calls up the now. Grunged and toxic, sure, but sickeningly familiar. You cannot recognize enough to say where this is, but you recognize it. All of it.

When Bob Weinstein rolls those trailers, each one assumes the predictable arc of a story compressed to its essence. There is a speed to them that the actual movie — which I saw before seeing the trailers — does not possess or seek to possess, an urgency that feels manufactured. The music is pulse-pounding and urgent, driven to create absurd expectations of action in a movie that quietly elicits worry about the relative friability of the invisible paths that exist between people and what they need. Still, every utterance, every cry for help or hand clasped across the mouth of the boy to suppress a sob, is a fair-enough emanation from the heart of the movie.

The odd thing is, the start of each trailer includes glimpses of a storm, panicky news footage, little puzzle pieces of the world before it ended. No one — not the director or the myriad producers, not the novelist or the screenwriter — had ever even hinted at how it happened, until this.

For someone who loves the book, for anyone who knows the story going in, this is a moment you hoped would never come. Why remind us of the reductive logic of cause and effect? Before the question can be asked, Weinstein stands up, offers his hand, and says, "Okay, we're going with the first one." He gives no rationale. And so it seems the metonymic references to the national news, to the weather, to presumed military conflicts laid in as a tonally quiet explanation of what is never known in book or movie, for now will stay in the trailer.

On the other side of the planet, at home in Australia, Hillcoat's been hearing about these trailers. "We're so conditioned by postapocalyptic films to be centered on a big event, and they become this high-concept thing. And here there's this total absence, this negation of explanation. We have to stay with that. So yeah. That's gonna be a challenge."

In good times or in shit times, you can ask why people go to see movies at all. The Road may be a kind of historical countertwitch to Depression-era Busby Berkeley musicals, to a time when people used movie theaters as places to forget. (Although how a kaleidoscopic mess like 42nd Street ever generated hope in 1933 is baffling.) But make no mistake, hit or miss, The Road, a risky, dyspeptic, and serious road movie, will be easy to lampoon, to dismiss, to skip. Unwary couples will walk out. Teenagers in search of the comfort nipple of cinematic apocalypse, with its blank-slate promise and its tinny hope for a new tomorrow, will roll their eyes. Bill Hader is probably writing the SNL skit right now.

The other certainty is that everyone involved in this movie is working against the predictable imperatives of perhaps the most predictable movie genre of them all: the apocalyptic thriller. The great experiment of the movie is that it hangs on nothing if not the subversion of the conventions of the genre. These people want the same thing from The Road that Busby Berkeley wanted, the same thing any artist with a sense of urgency wants. They want for people to walk out of the theater feeling it in their chest plate. They want them to say, perhaps for reasons they cannot consciously fathom, to everyone they know: You have to see it. Really.

You do. Not because it's grim, not because it's depressing, or even scary. The Road is all of those things, both acutely and chronically. But there was not a single stupid choice made in turning this book into this movie. No wrongheaded lyric tribute to the novel. No moment engineered simply to make you jump.

The terror of it is in a normal world made vacant. There is a surprising terror in a landscape of farmhouses full of possessions that have no function, a remarkable danger in a pile of old hammers, in the possibility of forgetting what things were once for. It's a fear worth feeling. And there is something knotty and resilient, eternal and elemental, something worth caring about in all this, in a parent's love for a child, especially when love is the only thing left in the world that has the least little thread of purpose.

That's their world, bleak and empty as it might be. Ours, too.

The Road opens this fall.

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