‘Some movies you watch, others you feel,” ran a 1980s ad campaign. Still others you withstand.
Black, bleak and tiresomely blunt, “The Road,” a reverent adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel about a father and son wandering across America after an unspecified catastrophe has nearly blotted out humanity, doesn’t offer plot or an inquiry into the evil in men’s hearts.
It simply wallows in the filth and inhumanity that surround a father (Viggo Mortensen) and his pre-adolescent son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as they march across the shattered remains of this country.
They meet and dodge a variety of hopeless and vicious characters, including members of an aggressive gang interested in serving man — for dinner.
“Zombieland” was the same movie with laughs, but if you take away the comedy, what is left? Nothing, on a vast scale. “The Road” overflows with nullity. Picture a black canvas on a crumbling wall in a forlorn museum.
Director John Hillcoat (“The Proposition”) has effectively re-created the horrors of the Pulitzer Prize novel. But it’s one that should not have been brought to the screen. Hillcoat’s misspent skillfulness means squirming through a scene that, while awful enough in the book, on-screen is too hideous to consider, though in McCarthy’s vision it makes perfect, awful sense. Let’s just say that starving people would do a lot to survive.
We learn in flashback that the Mortensen character’s wife (Charlize Theron) saw no better option than suicide. You’ll be wondering why the boy and the man don’t take the same way out. The only thing that seems to keep them going is that they’re characters in a movie and they need to fill up some running time by, for instance, chatting with a desperate old man (the encrusted remains of Robert Duvall).
A situation and a series of incidents don’t equal a story, though, which is why the book was so glaringly flawed. Who wants a date with agony?
An absurd and dishonest happy ending can’t be the reason for this movie’s gruesome rigors. Nor does “The Road” leave you feeling gratitude at your relative comforts. There isn’t a moral lesson, or a spiritual one, or a philosophical one, or a political one, though this last factor might be counted an advantage. At least we’re spared a lecture about how we deserved all this.
The only purpose I can detect in the smoldering wreckage is simple masochism; some people like to take a beating and others like to spend two hours cloaked in the most piteous distress. File “The Road” under apocalypse porn. Unlike “Wall-E” and “Children of Men,” though, this one offers no hope of renewal, no exit from the hell it so persuasively depicts.