Haunting, chilling, but this Road leads nowhere

When Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007, it was inevitable that it would be adapted for the big screen. But many fans of McCarthy, one of the world's greatest living English-language authors, feel this was a route Hollywood should never have gone down.

Two previous McCarthy screen adaptations were successful - All the Pretty Horses with Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz and No Country for Old Men with Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem. The latter was the most successful of the two, winning four awards at the 2008 Oscars, including best director for the Coen brothers.

But both those novels had the necessary ingredients, in terms of character and action, to make successful screenplays. The Road was a very different proposition.

The novel describes the nightmare journey of a father and son - survivors of an unnamed apocalypse - across a ravaged landscape. As the publisher's blurb said when it was first published in 2006, "Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation".

Little wonder that the majority of critics have baulked at the end result.

Director John Hillcoat has stuck closely to the book and has drawn vivid performances from Viggo Mortensen and the young Australian actor Kodi Smit-McPhee as the father and son, and from Robert Duvall in a powerful cameo.

The film has won some plaudits, too, for its melancholic photography and savage landscapes (shot in post-Katrina New Orleans). And according to its British screenwriter, Joe Penhall, McCarthy himself has given the film his blessing, describing it as "a film like no other film I've seen" after a private screening with Penhall and Hillcoat last year.

But most critics feel that ultimately the film falls short of McCarthy's novel, whose strength came from its terse dialogue and haunting authorial vision. And while the book offers transcendence and hope, the film is unrelentingly grim. As the Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan notes, "There is reason for us to endure [the novel's] pitiless descriptions of what Joseph Conrad described in Heart of Darkness as 'the horror, the horror'."

Ironically Hillcoat, who used heavy violence to great effect in his previous film The Proposition, shies away from any such tactics in The Road. Some critics, such as Variety’s Todd McCarthy, feel the film is too soft as a result. The Road should have been more "shocking, haunting and, at the end, deeply moving," writes McCarthy (clearly no relation) in a scathing review. Hillcoat has missed the bigger picture, and The Road leads nowhere.

WHAT THEY ARE SAYING:

Wendy Ide, the Times: "Two elements let the film down. First is a voiceover from Mortensen, which is a little heavy on the explication for my tastes. Second, and more serious, is the laboured score (co-written by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis)... It would have been better to have no music at all, and let the story play out to the accompaniment of the groans of the dying planet." (Verdict: 4/5 stars)

Tom Huddlestone, Time Out: "The Proposition director John Hillcoat's film is as direct and unflinching an adaptation as one could reasonably hope for… The trees are bare, the animals dead, the few human survivors starving, desperate, often violent, occasionally monstrous. The Road is certainly the bleakest and potentially the least commercial product in recent Hollywood history." (Verdict: 3/5 stars)

Steve Erickson, the Los Angeles Times: "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."

A.O. Scott, the New York Times: "The Road, though frequently powerful, and animated by a genuinely troubling premise, is hampered by compromises and half-measures… [it is] engrossing and at times impressive, a pretty good movie that is disappointing to the extent that it could have been great. Is this the way the world ends? With polite applause?"

Todd McCarthy, Variety: "Except for the physical aspects of this bleak odyssey by a father and son through a post-apocalyptic landscape, this long-delayed production falls dispiritingly short on every front. Showing clear signs of being test-screened and futzed with to death, the Dimension release may receive a measure of respect in some quarters but is very, very far from the film it should have been."