"The Road" is a road you'll wish hadn't been taken. Not because anything's been badly done, but because there's a serious imbalance in the complicated equation between what the film forces us to endure and what we end up receiving in return.
Given that it's based on Cormac McCarthy's somber novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for a devastating report from the end of the world witnessed by a man who's been there, it's no surprise that the film is for the most part profoundly depressing.
What is disappointing is that despite numerous strong areas, including fine acting by Viggo Mortensen and young Kodi Smit-McPhee as father-and-son survivors of an unnamed apocalypse, what we've been given is no more than a reasonable facsimile, an honorable attempt at filming an unfilmable book.
As adapted by British playwright Joe Penhall and directed by John Hillcoat, best known for the slickly violent "The Proposition," "The Road" turns out to be good at shocking and upsetting us, but it lacks the compensating emotional heft that would make absorbing those shocks worth our while.
For while Chris Kennedy's formidable production design places us in an uncomfortably real space, absent McCarthy's haunting language, "The Road" for the most part is not so good at transcendence, at making us feel, as the book definitely does, that there is reason for us to endure its pitiless descriptions of what Joseph Conrad described in "Heart of Darkness" as "the horror, the horror."
What Conrad was likely talking about, and what "The Road" devotes considerable time to on the screen and on the page, is the terrors that humans inflict on each other. One of the provocative questions this story asks is whether staying alive is worth the savagely inhuman actions necessary to make survival possible.
Unwilling to begin on a totally downbeat note, "The Road" opens with what turns out to be a dream flashback to a time just before the unspecified catastrophe happens, a time when Mortensen's unnamed man is married to Charlize Theron's unnamed woman and their first child is on the way.
Ten years into the post-apocalypse, the mother is gone, the unborn child is a young boy (Australian actor Smit-McPhee) and the world has changed. It's a blasted, blighted, ashen and slowly dying Earth, shaken by quakes, lighted by out-of-control fires and filled with dead cars, empty buildings, deserted bridges and very few people.
