The Road

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Barely a week old and 2010 has one of its best movies chalked up already. The Road, adapted from Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic story, is as bleak as they come but thanks to stirring performances from Mortensen and Smit-McPhee its heart outweighs even its grimmest of moments. And they can get pretty grim at times.

Set some time after a unnamed disaster has rendered the world almost uninhabitable, where society has broken down and gangs of gun-toting cannibals roam the now deserted roads, a Man (Mortensen) and a Boy (Smit-McPhee) struggle south in search of warmth and food. With only a revolver ("Two bullets: one for me, one for you.") for protection, the father and son team wander through the wintry landscape avoiding marauding thieves and killers.

McCarthy's book pulled no punches in its description of the depths humanity would plummet in such a situation and thankfully neither does its adaptation. Driven by nothing but survival, the Man and the Boy constantly face tasks and situations that strip away their morality, with the Boy asking, "Are we still the good guys?" Mortensen is a shoe-in for an Oscar nomination, balancing gritty determination with despair. His tired, sombre voice narrates the film, which allows the viewer a peak into his true feelings, feelings he has to cover up for his son's sake: "When it comes to the boy I have only one question - can you do it when the time comes?"

Director John Hillcoat showed in his last film, The Proposition, that less is more and he continues that motif here. The audience is never privy to what tragedy befell the world - nuclear war or environmental - and even the flashbacks to where Mortensen attempts to keep wife Charlize Theron together, as despair tears her mind apart, don't help on that front. There are two scenes in the book that stay in the memory. The first scene is when the heroes come across a country house where, in the cellar, they find emaciated men, women and children chained to the walls with their limbs cut off - a living pantry. The other scene is when the Boy finds the headless body of a baby on a spit. Hillcoat takes his 'less is more' pattern to these scenes too: the former is dealt with brevity; the latter didn't make the cut and let's be thankful for that.

The only fly in the ointment is the ending, which I will try to cover here without spoiling it. The climax of the book didn't sit right given what went before; Joe Penhall's adaptation sticks as rigidly to the book as he can and keeps McCarthy's closing scene and the jury is still out on that.