The Road (2009) – John Hillcoat (Friday’s Finest)

• The Man: Listen, we have to talk. That man back there… There’s not many good guys left, that’s all. We have to watch out for the bad guys. We have to just… keep carrying the fire.
• The Boy: What fire?
• The Man: The fire inside you.

Many years ago, I read the Cormac McCarthy novel from which today’s featured movie The Road was adapted. Cormac McCarthy is the author of No Country for Old Men which the Coen Brothers adapted for the screen in their Best Picture Oscar winning masterpiece. I’m not a buff of the ‘post-apocalypse movie’ so I had been holding off to see The Road. When I had nothing else better to do, I saw a recent viewing of it on the Film & Arts channel.

Movie Info:
A man and his young son struggle to survive after an unspecified catastrophe results in an extinction event which caused the death of all plant life and virtually all animal life. The man and boy travel on a road to the coast in hope that they can find safe haven, scavenging for supplies in their journey, and avoiding roaming cannibalistic rape gangs armed with guns.

I’m happy to write I was very impressed by The Road. It is a relatively faithful adaption of the novel although not as bleak and that’s a good thing since a 100% faithful adaptation would have been too heavy to watch. It focuses more on the emotional impact of the unspecified Armageddon; and while at times remaining very upsetting, it is shot through a lens of hope rather than despair. Mortensen is a given to be an actor embedded in his character, so much so that when he takes off his shirt we see his bony torso as being really that, and watching him is magnetic.

The name of the game is Survival, although none can say what the point of it is. The food is gone, and clearly no more will be growing. Humans are apparently the only animals to survive the unnamed global disaster, so they represent the sole remaining, rapidly dwindling source of protein. The voices you hear approaching are not the ‘Red Cross’. There is one scene described below which I found especially creepy, yet gripping and what I consider the pinnacle of the movie experience…Spoiler Alert!:

Exploring a mansion, the father and the boy discover people locked in the basement, imprisoned as food for their captors. When the cannibals return, the man and his son hide. With discovery imminent, the man prepares to shoot his son, but they flee when the cannibals are distracted by the escaping captives.

The circumstances of the apocalyptic event are never explained. Director John Hillcoat said “That’s what makes it more realistic, then it immediately becomes about survival and how you get through each day as opposed to what actually happened.”
The film had a budget of $20 million. Hillcoat preferred to shoot in real locations, saying “We didn’t want to go the CGI world.” Pennsylvania, where most of the filming took place, was chosen for its tax breaks and its abundance of locations that looked abandoned or decayed: coalfields, dunes, and run-down parts of Pittsburgh and neighboring boroughs.

References:
1. The Road (2009 film) – Wikipedia
2. The Road (2009) – IMDB

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“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand