[Editor's Note: We featured a capsule review of The Road during our TIFF coverage. What follows is a more extensive review -- and second opinion -- from staff critic Michelle Orange.]
Offering a sort of antidote to 2012's decadently catastrophic version of the world's end, which seems to stop just short of shooting confetti out of Christ the Redeemer as he tumbles into the sea, The Road positions itself as an apocalypse for the thinking masochist. Although riveting eyeballs to the spectacle of our most sacred monuments crumbling is old and reliably lucrative cinematic hat, the apocalypse is also a concept that has moved major artists to their greatest work, the most recent examples being Margaret Atwood's sequel to Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, from which this film is adapted. Director John Hillcoat, in attempting to realize McCarthy's vision of the planet -- and the fragile concept of humanity -- in chaos, delves so deeply into his source material that he commits the one sin Roland Emmerich, with his dominatrix-like wielding of sensual pleasure and punishment, cannot be accused of: he loses sight of the audience.
In a way it's understandable: it's pretty dark out there, on the road, where Man (Viggo Mortensen, looking stringy in every possible way) and his son Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) are making their way across a ravaged American shitscape. Successful chiefly as an aesthetic exercise, the post-apocalyptic world as envisioned by Hillcoat and art director Gershon Ginsburg is leeched of all color and vitality; what life remains -- the few human faces we see over the course of the two-hour film -- have also been absorbed by the soot and dust. In Mortenson and Smit-McPhee's case, this often reduces them to a pair of blue eyes, and the very rare flash of their teeth -- there's not much use for smiles in this new world of grim and perhaps senseless perseverance. Low walls of wild fire occasionally break up the asphalt skies, and although we are not told how or why the planet collapsed, it was quite pointedly an infernal affair.
The film begins in a flashback, where Man is joined by his pregnant wife (Charlize Theron), and the first signs of that enveloping hellfire are shown only in reflection, lighting up their faces in the middle of the night. Hillcoat's attempts to build an idiosyncratic, framing mystery around Man and Boy's predicament mostly backfires, and the flashbacks -- which ultimately indicate that, after giving birth and raising their son for several years in dire, post-civilized conditions, Woman decided to remove herself from the equation -- clog the film with sentiment and unresolved ideas that its stark frame was not designed to support. "I don't want to just survive," Woman says. "You sound crazy," Man replies. And indeed, the notion of womankind checking out of humanity is most provocative (I was reminded of it recently when considering the twisted nobility of endangered animals who won't mate in captivity), but Hillcoat is uninterested in exploring it as anything more than backstory.
And so the world Man and Boy trudge through, making their way to the coast for reasons that remain unexplained and make no sense on the terms the film sets up, is mostly male, highly tribal, and utterly godless, with the exception of son number one, of course. "He is an angel, to me he's a god," Man says, a remark in line with a number of similarly quasi-Christian incantations that never cohere into the one thing a human being would have left in a world without social, cultural, or religious structures: a convincing psychology. Instead, they just hang there, suspended in the plodding tones of Nick Cave's pump organ. Mortenson, face carved and scored to a Slavic essence, easily inhabits Man's bleak and often crazed determination, but the soul of the conflict between his ambivalence about humanity and his passion for his son -- a crucial element to a film with little dialogue and frustratingly intermittent narrative structure -- gets lost behind all that lovingly art directed grot.
Contributing to that barrier is Hillcoat's seeming indecision about whether to make a narrative film or a more experimental (and perhaps more crushing) ode to human extremity. The duo's guiding concern is about food -- finding it and not becoming it; prepared for suicide at any moment, the Man carries a gun with two bullets, lest they face a worse fate. Reduced to foraging animals, the most frightening thing the pair can come across on the road are not aliens or mutants or bombs but other human beings: "Whoever made humanity will find no humanity here," Man says, and as often as not he's a part of the dearth, refusing basic kindnesses to several strangers on the grounds of vicious self-preservation, behavior which devastates his son. The question only glancingly engaged and not even remotely resolved by the film is responsible for its lack of both a guiding philosophy and an emotional core: is there an inherent good not only in individual humans but in (continued) human existence? What are people without a planet, and what is the planet without people? Hillcoat crafts several memorable sequences around the perilous balance of human sanity and civilization as a learned condition: when the pair happen upon a bunker filled with food, the act of bathing and dressing to eat becomes a kind of sacred ritual, a return to dignity. Alternately, when they discover a beautifully appointed, intact house, it is this, the film's most civilized exterior, that conceals its most sensationally gruesome depiction of human depravity.
Ultimately, however, there's no clear argument for human endurance, which (leaving aside the laughably treacly finale, which I feel it is my duty as the enemy of cliché and focus testing to do) makes it hard to care about who survives and who doesn't. I left the film only a little disappointed about the world ending, although that's always a bit of a drag; what bothered me more was the film's contagious inertia, the emotional stasis that left me feeling -- half-assed child-savior hints notwithstanding -- like the whole lot of them would be better off dead.