John Hillcoat's setting of Cormac McCarthy's The Road

[throatybeard]

I'm not a movie theater guy; I'm a Netflix guy. I wait for all the word of mouth and some of the reviews and the Oscar buzz to wash over me, and then I Netflix what I think I'm going to like based on all that. The time between theatrical release has gotten pretty short anyway. There are a few exceptions--I go see every Bond movie with my father, and a few people have have earned a lifetime seal of approval such that I'll take in their work going in blind. But I'm not the sort of person who gets all excited when a trailer comes out, or camps out at midnight for a theatrical release. I'll see it when I see it. I wish I could summon the sort of enthusiasm the hardcore theater-goers have, but I'm just more of a waiter and seer.

But then came news that John Hillcoat (of The Propostion) was directing Viggo Mortensen (of Viggo Mortensen) in a film setting of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

This thing was in production hell, then post-production hell, then finding a release date hell. It was originally supposed to come out thirteen months ago. Then March. Then May. Then 16 October. Then finally today. An initial trailer made it look like a bad B-horror movie. One advance review was awful. Another said it would be the best film of the year. It made the rounds of some film festivals. RT buzz gradually got more positive. Roger Ebert, whose taste I find nearly unerring, gave it just 2.5 stars and said the book was basically unfilmable, but they tried very hard. But, now he has re-reviewed it, with a prologue about how he didn't really mean for the hasty first review to come out, and his take is more positive, at 3.5 stars. There are other promising indicators, such as the cameo by Robert Duvall as the old man. But still, I don't want to get my hopes up.

Have any of y'all ever had a film which it felt like you had a whole relationship with it before you even saw it? That's where I'm at with this, and it's weird.

The Road opens at a single theater in StL Metro, and fortunately it's the one 8 blocks from our place. We're going to attempt to slightly overfeed the baby into a food coma and sit near the back door of the theater for quiet exits in case of ululation. I wouldn't miss this for the world.

It's snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of Christendom.

McCarthy is incredible when it comes to showing how mundane process shapes human experience.

When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

Ebert on The Proposition: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.d...S/60509003/1023

[brevity]

The Road opens at a single theater in StL Metro, and fortunately it's the one 8 blocks from our place.

Gotta be the Tivoli.

Back in the day I was a member of the St. Louis Film Festival (which was free, at least then) and got screening passes to all sorts of indie movies. But even regular movies were inexpensive. If there's one thing I miss about St. Louis, it was the cheap movie ticket prices. I don't think I ever paid more than $5. And this wasn't even 15 years ago.

Let us know what you thought of the movie.

[Heelkiller1]

I really hope the movie is at least 1/2 as good as the book.I know movies most of the time don't even come close to the power of the original book.But I'm really hoping that this is one that is close.

[allenmurray]

I really hope the movie is at least 1/2 as good as the book.I know movies most of the time don't even come close to the power of the original book.But I'm really hoping that this is one that is close.

If the movie is only 1/2 as good as the book it will stil be great.

[allenmurray]

Alas, The Road is not playing in the Triangle area. So much for being a cultural center.

[allenmurray]

Does anyone with insight/info on the movie industry have a sense when this will see wider release? I do understand that by living in the triangle I am not in a "big city", but this area certainly seems to have the kind of demographics this movie would be looking for (in terms of education level, cultural awareness, major universities, etc.). I'm disapointed it is not playing around here.

Throaty - did you see it? Thoughts?

[weezie]

Have any of y'all ever had a film which it felt like you had a whole relationship with it before you even saw it? That's where I'm at with this, and it's weird.

Oh geez yes. I am very hesitant to see this movie as I was completely swept away by the book. I really did cry as I read the last few pages. The scene involving the beach and the boat and the gun also made me hurt!

I'm waiting to hear from our people here.

[Heelkiller1]

I will watch the movie ,but i will not expect it to be as good as the book. Reading the book was almost like being there my self. No movie can do that.

[throatybeard]

(Spoilerish; I won't reveal the last thing that happens, but everything else is up for discussion).

I saw it thrice, and took notes the second time with an eye towards a detailed review, but life happened and I never wrote it up. I almost feel like I can't talk about this film objectively because it means so much to me. Most people would have to rent it anyway, since it was a limited release. I saw though, in weeks 1 and 2, that it's per-theater gross was higher than anything else in those weeks, amazingly.

I would say that in general, my fears were misplaced and The Road far excelled my anticipation. It is not a masterpiece, but it's not far off. There are a couple medium-sized flaws. The best thing that can be said about it is that this is magnificently faithful to the book without being slavishly so. My students were talking about it, and I mentioned how No Country for Old Men--by some accounts the finest film of the 2000s--nonetheless has so much Cohen "syrup" on its surface and in all its cracks that, even though its a quite faithful adaptation of McCarthy's book, it taste and smells primarily Cohen. Which is fine. But Hillcoat's adaptation of The Road is even more faithful, and it's as McCarthy as it could be. The book may be "unfilmable," as Ebert said, but they did their damnedest.

This film is VERY difficult to sit through. I can't quite put it in what I call the "Seven/Requiem for a Dream/Holocaust Movie" category--demonstrably great pictures that you nonetheless can't sit through again. I bawled through about a third of it, and while I'm very sensitive, I don't out-and-out cry at movies that much. The flashback scenes when Charlize Theron wanders off into the dark to die, I just lost my s***. Another really painful moment is when they happen upon a piano in an abandoned house, following a few flashbacks of Theron attempting to teach Mortensen to play Bach.

Much, but not all of the voiceover is from McCarthy's text. They displayed fantastic judgment in excerpting the "if the child is not the word of God God never spoke" passage. Looking at the boy, Viggo flashes a scarcely perceptible smile.

The film opens with a flashback to pre-apocalypse view of Mortensen (The Man) and Charlize Theron (the Wife), happy. Then the conflagration. Then to Viggo in the present with The Boy, struggling to survive in a burned Appalachia. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' score is superb, in the tracks that aren't horror prompts. The title track is simple, gorgeous, and poignant, reminiscent of Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel. It begins with the first inversion of an a-minor triad (if my ear is any good) on the piano, and then a viola with a mute on supplies the melody. The score is gorgeous in most tracks; one of the drawbacks, however, is that the suspense cues are just as cheesey as suspense cues tend to be. The risk this film always ran was looking like a horror film, which it isn't. But there's not a lot you can do with cannibals, visually, that doesn't situate them in a way that doesn't look like the horror genre. Especially in Antebellum houses in the middle of nowhere.

If the film excels the book in any way, it is in a richer development of the wife, now dead. Theron's performance is amazing. She loves her husband, but not really the child, born in the early moments of the crisis. (She says something to this effect--the trauma of giving birth during the early days of the crisis has somehow deadened her to the Boy). And Theron does a good job of portraying that in her face, in the scenes with the flashback when they're down to their last two bullets, for possible eventual suicide, and when she leaves to die of exposure. She does, however, manage two semi-repentant looks when she embraces Viggo for the last time. In all, she's a hell of a lot more realistic about the situation than he is; his hope, though, is what drives the story and makes it ultimately life-affirming.

There are so many amazing scenes. They find a Coke machine with one Coca Cola in it. Viggo opens it with his knife. The sharing of the Coke resembles the secular communion with the milk and strawberries in The Seventh Seal. Viggo decides that, to survive, both he and The Boy have to try to forget Theron. He tosses his wallet with pictures of her off a bridge on the abandoned PA Turnpike. Then he takes his wedding band off. Pushes it along a crooked crack in the concrete towards the edge. Near the edge, its path brakes with the other path and he pushes it gently off the edge. Some reviewers said the film was unrelentingly grim; not true. There are several respites--all the more valuable because of the gravity of the situation. They take a bath in a waterfall and have a great time. When they find the bomb shelter with the food, they spend a few nights there. He's bathing the boy, and the boy registers the irresistible charm of the word "shampoooooo." There are really too many of these moments to list. The scene with Robert Duvall over the campfire alone is worth the price of admission.

The goal--to get to the coast--exhibits no outward logic but flawless internal logic: to survive, they have to have a goal. The Boy does a pretty good job of masking his disappointment when they get there and it's an ashen mess just like everywhere else. From the map (actually of south Texas, but meant to be the mid-Atlantic somewhere probably), they boy had hoped it would be blue.

The growing problem in The Road is one of the central difficulties of parenthood. Ostensibly, protecting one's children is altruistic, but in practice, one has to do a bunch of selfish things to protect oneself and the child. The Man trusts no one at the beginning of the story but wants the boy to understand that they are the good guys; towards the end, however, desperate and dying, he begins losing his moral compass and The Boy has to be his for him. The Boy begins standing up to him more and more: "you always think bad things are going to happen;" "You can't even tell [who the good guys are] anymore." He doesn't even want to share one can of peaches with Duvall, but the boy makes him.

Too, relationships of two people set against the world can't be entirely healthy. This summer during Camp Wagner in Seattle, I gave a lot of thought to controlling parents in opera who mess up their kids' lives. Wotan manages to destroy his three favorite children in a single day. The elder Germont in Traviata takes away the only thing sustaining the life of his surrogate daughter figure, Violetta. Perhaps Verdi's greatest father-child dyad, Rigoletto and Gilda, is contaminated by an incestuous energy. If The Man's quest is to keep The Boy safe and get to the coast, The Boy's quest is to find another little boy. He loves his father but desperately wants to live in a world where there's someone else to interact with. Over and over, with the Duvall character, with the guy who steals their cart on the beach, with a little boy in the town where Viggo grew up, The Boy is frustrated by his father's inability to interact positively with anyone else. It probably has to be that way, but their relationship is problematized by their excessive closeness.

I've already praised Theron. Mortensen is cast so perfectly that one can't imagine the film with anyone else. He somehow makes his voice sound like Henry Fonda (think Grapes of Wrath) at times. If he doesn't get a best actor nomination, I'm going to be hoppin mad. Kodi Smit-McPhee plays the Boy. I'm not sure how well I like his performance. It's hard to criticize child actors. There are points at which his performance is a little over the top, but I may be judgingly him unfairly.

Go see it if you can, or rent it when the DVD comes out in April. It's an important film.

[JasonEvans]

I can appreciate a movie, and appreciate the quality that goes into making it, while not enjoying the experience of watching it.

That was the case with The Road (for me and my wife).

I found the film to be unrelenting in its depression. The fact that the father does not act like "a good guy" in the final third of the film when he finally has a chance to show his humanity really turned me off. He gets there, with a ton of prodding from the boy, but it is largely too late at that point. So, the character we have been following and rooting for all along was nothing special. I mean, he isn't a child-raping cannibal, but he isn't nearly a compassionate human being either. If anything, he is so focused on protecting his child that he has forgotten how to be a human. It turned me off.

I have no idea what the message of the film was supposed to be. The first 2/3rds are all about "survive and reach the coast." Then they get there and it is like the film has lost its purpose. No, I did not want the coast to be beautiful, lush civilization -- of course not -- but one tiny glimpse of hope would have been nice. Maybe they could see a small fish or perhaps a sprout could have been growing out of one of the sand dunes. Give me something to reward me for going along with you for 2 hours of dust, ash, and death!!

I walked out of it wondering what was the point? Why bother to survive if there is nothing to survive for? I almost wanted everyone to commit suicide because the film did not give them any hope for a better life.

My wife hated that they left the bomb shelter. She would have stayed a while longer. I think the father wanted them to keep moving because he knew he was running out of time and he had an irrational fear of being caught, but it still bothered her a lot. After all, that shelter had gone undiscovered for like a decade, why was he worried about it being discovered now?

She also did not like Theron's character wandering off to die. I understood that Theron had given up on life and hope but I wanted a reason for Viggo to still believe. I suppose his reason was his son, which is sweet, but then the film gave me no reason to expect that the son would do anything other than starve to death at some point in the future. I was never given the impression that there was any hope for him to have a good life. Viggo's hope was in vain.

Sorry, Throaty. I did not read the book so that may be coloring my view of what happened in the film. I imagine those faithful to the book would have been turned off by any sign of hope in the film. Still, I wanted something in the end to justify the struggle of the father and son (and moviewatchers too).

I agree that it was well-acted. I agree that it was unflinchingly directed in a dark fashion. I admire that and all the movie-making craft that went into this film... but I did not enjoy watching it.

--Jason "and the ending... don't even get me started on that!!" Evans

[allenmurray]

he is so focused on protecting his child that he has forgotten how to be a human. It turned me off.

But so very real. I think al of us, stripped of everything that matters, will revert to protecting our children, even at the expense of our humanity.

[JasonEvans]

But so very real. I think al of us, stripped of everything that matters, will revert to protecting our children, even at the expense of our humanity.

Hmmm. Yeah, I can buy that. Still, it does not make it a satisfying moviegoing experience for me. All my criticism centers on how I felt about the film from an enjoyment standpoint. Technically, it is a very well-made film.

--Jason "my wife and I actually did an apocalypse double-feature seeing The Road and 2012 in the same night... whew!!" Evans

[allenmurray]

Hmmm. Yeah, I can buy that. Still, it does not make it a satisfying moviegoing experience for me. All my criticism centers on how I felt about the film from an enjoyment standpoint. Technically, it is a very well-made film.

--Jason "my wife and I actually did an apocalypse double-feature seeing The Road and 2012 in the same night... whew!!" Evans

I agree - I don't expect it to be enjoyable. I think one of the sub-themes in McCarthy's book was to explore just how far we will go to protect our children. Will we give up our own humanity? If we believe iin such a place as "hell" will we willingly go there to protect our children? I think that the man's willingness to become what he hates, in order to protect his son, was a theme of darkness battling light battling darkness. To ponder the depths to which we would go to protect our children is scary indeed.

[JasonEvans]

I agree - I don't expect it to be enjoyable. I think one of the sub-themes in McCarthy's book was to explore just how far we will go to protect our children. Will we give up our own humanity? If we believe iin such a place as "hell" will we willingly go there to protect our children? I think that the man's willingness to become what he hates, in order to protect his son, was a theme of darkness battling light battling darkness. To ponder the depths to which we would go to protect our children is scary indeed.

Yes, but what are we protecting them for? to what end are we protecting them? The world of The Road seemed to offer no hope. If The Man was existing and sacrificing his soul to protect his son, I wanted there to be some hope that the son might someday find a better life. I never got that which made the story feel so dissatisfying in the end.

--Jason "now that we are talking about it more, I am appreciating it more" Evans

[throatybeard]

I am perturbed that Viggo didn't get a best actor nomination. Probably has to do with the limited release.

[Tommac]

I read the book this past week and it was probably the most depressing writing I have ever read, but was also moving at the same time. I haven't seen the movie. I don't think it played in my area, but I'll probably rent or buy it when it comes out since Vigo is one of my favorite actors.

[throatybeard]

The Road came out on DVD yesterday, and I hadn't seen it since the theater, thrice, in late fall. It's here tonight via Netflix.

OMG! The dude who steals their cart is played by Michael K Williams. (Who plays Omar in The Wire).

It suffers from not being on the big screen. Or either I've got my television set too dark. The color palate was mostly grey, of course, but the greys were better differentiated.

The Mortensen-Duvall scene is still one of the greatest I've ever seen in cinema.

I've relented from my "the book can't be filmed (but Hillcoat did as well as possible)" stance because I talked to my friend who's a short fiction writer. He says a popular opinion in the Southern Lit community (to which McCarthy has at least some thematic ties, in earlier books) is that, at least compared to his masterpieces of 25 and 30 years ago, Blood Meridian and Suttree, No Country for Old Men and The Road read almost like screenplays. The first two are much larger in scope. He thinks McCarthy (1933-) has been actually fishing for screen adaptations in his autumn years.

That said, news of a film adaptation of Blood Meridian has been kicking around some time. A year or two ago I was hearing Ridley Scott, but now it looks like Todd Field is directing it. His resume is brief but extremely impressive: In the Bedroom and especially Little Children.