La Route

Greetings again from the darkness. The most recent adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel brought us the fantastic No Country for Old Men (Coen Bros.). McCarthy's post-apocalyptic The Road did not seem to set up well as filmed entertainment. Director John Hillcoat proves otherwise.

Make no mistake. This film is as bleak and filled with despair as any you have ever seen. This is not the SFX of fluff like 2012. This is the humanistic side of desperation and survival in a world where what little has survived seems grotesque and evil.

It is a phenomenal movie from a technical aspect, yet a higher rating seems off the mark, as so very few movie goers will find the entertainment value of such an achievement. While viewing, one can't help but weigh the ever-present option of suicide. What would we do in this situation? Do you continue to carry the fire or do you ask, what's the point, and hit the eject trigger? If you thought Charlize Theron was unappealing in Monster, you will find her absolutely intolerable here. Her beauty is overridden by her angst and unwillingness to continue the fight for her survival. Is she the rational one or totally selfish? Really good question.

The vast majority of the film is Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee on their quest for the coast ... their ultimate goal for survival. The gray and lifeless landscape would (and does)suck the hope and soul right out of most. Viggo keeps trudging while teaching his young, more sensitive son, who by the way, is a dead ringer for Charlize (were she a 12 year old boy). The grayness of the film is so intense, that the dream/flashback sequences couldn't help but make me wonder if life were black and white, would dreams be vivid and colorful? Fans of No Country for Old Men will catch a glimpse of Garret Dillahunt as the hillbilly gang member who stumbles upon the Father and Son - Dillahunt was Tommy Lee Jones' entertaining deputy. Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce also have brief, but welcome, supporting roles. Duvall actually does quite a bit with his limited lines.

While it seems odd to release this one at Thanksgiving - it's not in the tradition of mass-appeal holiday fare, it is a must see for any true film lover or literature addict. To see the gray and stillness become as overwhelming as what is usually limited to one's imagination is worth the effort.

Just got back from seeing THE ROAD.

I had been very impressed by the novel and was concerned about how it would be adapted. The tone of the novel is almost unremittingly bleak and a 100% faithful adaptation would be very difficult to watch.

I'm happy to report that the film is very good indeed. It solves the problem of being unendurably depressing by concentrating on the emotional impact of the unspecified Armageddon, rather than the day to day fight for food, shelter and so on. So while at times it remains very upsetting it is shot through with hope rather than despair. I always felt the end of the novel was somewhat out of kilter with the rest of it but in the film it seems quite appropriate.

I think the film is more about the collapse of civility rather than civilization: for a film that shows the last remnants of mankind struggling to eke out an existence it is remarkably concerned with relationships. That's probably why the exact cause of the catastrophe is left blank: the film isn't really about the end of the world so much as the end of society. It's an interesting companion piece to NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN in which an ageing man sees nothing but horror in the modern world. In THE ROAD a man convinces himself, for the sake of his son, that humanity will abide even in the face of appalling conditions.

By Zach Copeland "The Road" Takes Fresh Approach to Post-Apocalyptic Genre Ever since God flooded out the entire human race in the early pages of Genesis, literature has abounded with stories of the apocalypse. For generation after generation, from The Book of Revelations to The Stand, we have obsessed over the end of the world, how it will come to pass, and what, if anything, we can do to stop it. Now that humankind has reached a point where the End could conceivably happen in an afternoon, our glimpses into this theoretical future are all the more intriguing. And they've never been more important.

The Road, directed by John Hillcoat (The Proposition) and based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy (No Country For Old Men), is a dark, poignant story of a father and son journeying through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, withstanding harsh weather, malnutrition, and under the constant threat of marauders, thieves and cannibals. Their goal is simple: to carry on.

Those looking to sink their teeth into mindless disaster-porn (not that there's anything wrong with that) can get their fix elsewhere. The Road is a smaller, more penetrating film that draws strength from its intimacy and its ability to do so much with so little.

Viggo Mortensen gives an emotional tour de force as the embattled father; look for him on the red carpet come March. Watching children act is oftentimes painful for me, but I thought Kodi Smit-McPhee was impressive and genuine as the son, and takes on the task of being in literally every scene with rare fearlessness. Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, and Guy Pearce give small but highly memorable performances, Duvall in particular, whose portrayal of a withered old man journeying all alone will haunt you.

The desolate environment in which the story takes place is itself a character, foreign yet eerily familiar, and so perfectly conceptualized that it matches – heck, surpasses the standard of realism set by films such as 28 Days Later and Children of Men. Shot throughout four states, including at the site of the Mount St. Helens eruption, Hillcoat and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe (The Others, The Sea Inside) paint a backdrop that is altogether beautiful and devastating.

They say that every generation since the dawn of man has feared the End, and while this may be true, not every generation has seen what our modern technology is capable of. The Road is a dark looking glass into our future, and what it is likely to become if our primal nature is left unchecked.

Early in the film, the son looks at his father and asks him, "We're the good guys, right?" The father's response is in the affirmative, but as their situation become increasingly desperate, that sense of morality we think to be ingrained is put to the test. Hillcoat does a masterful job of portraying human beings as what we are and always have been. He holds up a mirror to the world and hypnotizes you with it.

As far as post-apocalyptic movies go, The Road is hands-down one of the best ever made. Despite its raw, gritty facade, which will understandably be a turn-off for many theatergoers, the story underneath has a sense of serenity that everyone can relate to.

The Road opens everywhere on November 25. Need I say more? *The Film Crusade* www.filmcrusade.com/survive-and-advance/

"We are not gonna quit. We are gonna survive this." The Man

Survival is the ultimate motif of the Cormack McCarthy Pulitzer The Road. And so too is the film adaptation, faithful to the original while adding what McCarthy can't—the actualization of a landscape barren of life and humans barren of humanity. Then again, the film's failure is being even bleaker than the source, a testimony to the power of the imagination.

Except for a father (Viggo Mortensen) and young son (Kodi Smit-Mcphee), who represents the hope of the human race as the story assumes the trappings of allegorical, post-apocalyptic literature and film where the desolate outside mirrors the lonely inside of the humans, not all of whom are willing to carry on the good fight. Suicide becomes a leitmotif, a companion to hope as if out of a Bergman film, an escape from the horrible aftermath of devastation never explained. So much the better because allegorically there are numerous ways for us to ruin our earth and our spirits. Not the least of which could be nuclear or cannibal; the former does not make an appearance while the latter is omnipresent.

Director John Hillcoat has emphasized more than McCarthy the role, by flashback, of the wife/mother (Charlize Theron), but overall he has taken dialogue directly from the novel and stayed true to the bleak landscape where the sun doesn't shine and the trees fall intermittently like humans giving up the ghost.

The gray tones and beat up humans are like those in most post- apocalyptic films; however, as in Children of Men to a lesser extent, the focus is on how to survive, not even how to avoid death. In both cases, it's up to the young ones to "carry a fire' (the mantra of The Road), itself a metaphor for the strength to survive:

"Everything depends on reaching the coast. I told you I would do whatever it takes." The Man

While watching this movie I thought to myself that it was good I had already read the book. This was because the movie is agonizingly desperate and sad--often times it was just too much to absorb or handle in such a large dose. You can't put this movie down like you can with the book. Unlike the book being beautifully written, in an almost poetic prose, which distracted the reader from the subject, the movie is not beautifully shot. In your face is desperation, agony, and death.

I can understand why this movie was shelved for a year. Do not go into it looking to be entertained, at best look to be intellectually stimulated. This is no popcorn movie.