The Road - review of the film by John Hillcoat starring Viggo Mortensen.
It was a very difficult adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize: it was very difficult to reflect the themes, tones and narrative style of such an intense, emotional and unique novel.
But those who had seen The Proposition knew that Australian director John Hillcoat had what it took to make it, and the...
There remains of the other, a more and more conspicuous residue in the middle of the surrounding nothing: there remains a child who carries fire and a man who protects him from the inclement weather of the half-dead world with implacable love, man and child translated into every Man and every Child, with responsibilities and roles that encompass and transcend those of individuals. And there remains, therefore, a discreet look forward and perhaps upwards, in addition to the nostalgic one turned to gaze at the kingdom of man as we know it.
In McCarthy's response - epic, elegiac, mythical, prophetic, heartbreaking, universal - even the unpredictable remains: an affectionate everyday life that comforts and warms the heart.
The Road - the review
A man and a child travel through the ruins of a world reduced to ashes in the direction of the ocean, where perhaps the cooled rays of a now livid sun will give off a little warmth and some glimmer of life.
They drag with them on the road everything that has a certain value in the new balance of things: a supermarket trolley with which they can remedy, a tarp to shelter from the freezing rain and a gun with which to defend themselves from the gangs of marauders who beat the streets determined to survive at any cost.
"The Road", by Cormac McCarthy, is a novel that you will not forget: for the emotional and evocative power, for the desperate darkness that strikes both the stomach and the heart, for the depth of reasoning put subtly into play on issues such as humanity, faith, redemption. And for a very dry writing, essential yet able to communicate details and feelings in a very rich way. Faced with a text of this kind, the challenge of translating the story and the style of the book into a cinematographic image was a risky and ambitious one. And it was not enough to choose a priori the path of fidelity to the text - and not of its modification or implementation - to sufficiently protect oneself.
While recognizing the honesty of Joe Penhall's screenplay, it is therefore in the direction of Australian John Hillcoat that The Road succeeds and convinces both those who know the original material and those who simply approach the film without any previous knowledge. The desperate odyssey of Man and his son through the gray and devastated landscape of a post-apocalypse America is translated into images while maintaining intact its dark and desperate charge, its rhapsodically fragmented yet fluid and continuous at the same time. The protagonists Viggo Mortensen and the young Kodi Smit-McPhee, give the desperate intensity necessary to their characters, and move through a devastated and devastating world made excellent in its chromatic depression by the apt photography of Javier Aguirresarobe.
With these elements at his disposal, Hillcoat shoots as if he were a neutral observer, filming the events trying to suggest as little as possible, showing and participating with discretion only when really necessary, letting the emotion that comes from the text do most of the work: a step backwards only in appearance, in reality an operation that requires great directorial awareness. The only "sensitive" interventions that the Australian has allowed himself are those related to the flashbacks in which Mortensen and Charlize Theron are the protagonists (they are also merciless in the pain they tell and provoke) and the use of music by Nick Cave: always very measured interventions that never break the raw essentiality of the context.
The rest is McCarthy's own work: a desperate tale of paternal and filial love, of pain, a reflection on human nature, on survival and its ways and meanings, on the sense of hope and redemption. From this point of view, Hillcoat is simply a translator: and like all the best translators, he makes himself almost invisible so as not to alter the strength of the original.
And then the most precious asset: oneself and mutual love.
"We'll be fine, won't we, papa?"
Yeah. We'll get by.
And nothing bad will happen to us,
Exact.
Because we bring fire.
Yes. Because we bring fire, "
"Look around you," he said. - There is no prophet in the long history of the earth to whom this moment does not do justice. Whatever form you talked about, you were right ».
What is left when there is no more after because the after is already here?
Generations of scientists, mystics and writers have offered their visions of light and darkness in response. They have promised us hells of water and fire and celestial afterlife, irrevocable ends and new births, they have variously fascinated or repulsed us, reassured or terrified us.
In McCarthy's unsurpassed creation, the post-apocalypse has the realistic face of a father and a son traveling on a tangle of roads without origin and without destination, inside a nature reduced to a dry shell, among the frighteningly recognizable vestiges of an emptied world It's useless.
Therefore, human beings condemned to survival remain on this path, their daily ordeal to satisfy irrepressible needs and obliterate others, the fury of betrayed humanity and the residual, priceless remnants of pleasure of being alive; the very pure crystals of the feeling that binds father and son and of the relationships that the two weave between themselves and with others remain, reduced to the extreme essence in ferocity as in tenderness.
And the words remain, splendid, precise, much more numerous now than the things they serve to designate; McCarthy's prodigious language elevated to a funeral song for "the sacred language, deprived of its referents and therefore of his reality".