1138 REPORT CARD: 6/10 (C-) Better luck next time.
Should you go to see this movie…ermmm. Well let me put it this way, if I were standing at the box office, looking at the list of films on offer, I’d be looking for another film to watch. But if it were a choice between The Road (2009) or The A Team (2010), Charlize Theron would get the vote over BA Baracus!
An Apocalypse is not good for the forests!
The Road (2009) is one of those films that I feel I should be talking about; that I should be saying good things about; that I should be regarding as important and worth seeing. Unfortunately, it is not really worth all the hype. It is, in a few short words, a film full of nothing.
Having said this, I’d still pay to go and watch the film, so in many ways, it is not actually that bad. The film accurately portrays the morose desolation and destruction that forms the underpinning of Cormack McCarthy’s novel. I’ve never seen an apocalypse, let alone a post-apocalypse, and yet if I am fair, what the film provides as a back drop, is pretty much what I had in mind as I read McCarthy’s novel. The look of the film, the mise-en-scène, and cinematography (Javier Aguirresarobe) are spectacular, but really, there is little more to The Road (2009) than this.
There is something that is not quite right with the film. I read McCarthy’s novel just after it was released in 2006, I loved it, as I do all of his novels. He paints a picture in the mind of the reader like few writers can; I love the violence and the brutality and the humanity in them, they are thought provoking, the violence is a means to a thought provoking end rather than the end itself. Maybe this is the main problem that I have with The Road (2009); that is never really comes close to the images and actions I’ve had in my head since I first read the novel; it is just not what I think it should be; book adaptations rarely are. The film just doesn’t do anything.
Child in a strop!
One of the biggest ‘turn offs’ in a film for me is ‘whining’. I cannot stand the ‘lets get ourselves killed just to make ourselves feel more virtuous’ characters; I just want to slap them and say, “For God sake, get a bloody grip of yourself!” I simply cannot be doing with those characters that will not be told, or will not shut up, and you know this is to be the cause of their downfall. It is only the last refuge for poor writing, a cop out for a character that quickly provides cheap sensationalism. When a scriptwriter can find no other credible method of driving a narrative forward, they throw in a bit of whining! I’d rather have an explosion and Mr. T! When ‘The Boy’ Kodi Smit-McPhee, starts to whine and whimper, and clearly ignore the concept of danger or common sense, I have little sympathy for him, I start to feel that I just want to give him a slap. These feelings never once arose while reading the child’s protestations in the novel, I empathised with his torment and confusion and need for a connection.
4 MPG, I don't think so. I see Gangs in a Toyota Yaris!
In the film, I wince when ‘The Boy’ wants his own way at the expense of survival, not because a boy should not be indulged, but because the whining shouldn’t be there. More thought should be given to try to illustrate character motivation. And this must be a difficult thing to achieve given the limited scope for a visual interpretation of the novel. Maybe this comment is then more a reflection on the idea that The Road is perhaps not a novel that can translate very well to cinema. Other than the whining ‘The Boy’ is fantastic. Smit-McPhee delivers a stellar performance, mostly. Mostly, the performance is understated, slow, reserved and restrained. The character is a child that has to understand childhood through both his own terms, and the terms laid down to him by his Father, ‘The Man’ (Viggo Mortensen). As a child growing up with only one model on which to base his behaviour, I can’t see where this whining comes from.
Don't mess with Omar!
I have been continually talking about the novel versus the movie, and perhaps I need to remind myself that this article was intended to be about the movie and not about the novel. In reality however I am not really comparing like for like; and yet I keep being drawn back to the novel as there seems to be little in the movie worth serious attention. This movie is somehow the victim of previous films’ successes. No Country For Old Men (2007) was both a spectacular novel and film, and yet the main distinction between the two novels is that while No Country For Old Men is full of vivid characters and actions, The Road contains virtually nothing like the same action, or characters; the two novels are antithetical. The Road is a perfect novel, but a useless story for a film. The Road (2009) is therefore the victim of the Hollywood system, there seems to be so little in the way of originality in Hollywood that any new stream of originality is swallowed up, eaten whole, devoured and spat out. Blood Meridian, written in 1985 and Cities of the Plain, written in 1998 are both now in the Hollywood pipeline, which sort of illustrates my point.
Chose the wrong novel to adapt!
The prophecy that I made when I heard the film was going into production, that it wouldn’t be very good, has, in my opinion become a reality, the film is not actually that good; but I still wanted to watch it. But this is a reflection of the fact that the novel is not a film, rather than the creative forces working on the film. The look of the film, for example, is just stunning, the acting, except the whining, is outstanding, John Hillcoat’s direction is first rate; it’s just that the film doesn’t really contain anything, it doesn’t really do anything; which in many ways, keeps it true to the novel. It’s simply a collection of beautiful images that link together to form nothing really at all. The memory of the film will, like the setting in the film, soon return to dust and be forgotten.
Kino 1138 