The Road (2009)

I ventured out in the cold weather ( - 15 degrees) to go watch The Road, John Hillcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel with the same name. It's a gut-wrenching movie, so it was a peculiar absurdity in watching the gray, desolated landscapes of the film to the obligatory additional soundtrack of popcorn-munching moviegoers. You might know the story. Some sort of disastrous event has taken place that has killed most life on earth. Father & son head south with the hope that the surroundings would be less uncongenial over there. In Finnish merchandise, the film has been labeled "action drama". That is quite misleading, as there is little action in the ordinary sense here (although there are many scenes that are gut-wrenchingly suspenseful). The Road is by all means a good film. The characters have been successfully adapted to the screen (the kid is played by Kodi Smith-McPhee, Raimond Gaita in Romulus my father! Which is kind of fun because the film touches on themes that are brought up in Rai Gaita's philosophy...). Viggo Mortensen is great, he has a sort of physical presence in the film that is admirable. The raw feel of the images, the bleak landscape, the lack of aesthetic gratification, also make this a film worth seeing. That said, I am not sure if watching the film was very different from reading the book. Hillcoat sticks to McCarthy's style of writing, transforming it into images. He does it successfully. But could he have done it more originally? I had unreasonably high expectations on this film, and even though I wasn't let down, I have the stupid feeling that the movie was a bit too much what I expected it to be. To hell with expectations. But this is a minor complaint.

One reviewer claims that the virtue of Hillcoat's rendition of the story lies in its being more direct than McCararthy's book that, according to the reviewer, employs sparseness only as a literary tool. I do agree with this to some extent (even though I don't agree with the reviewer that McCarthy's errand is to ask the question "are you man enough to take it?").

But what matters is that Hillcoat/McCarthy is not in the business of providing us with yet another "what if...." sort of story (and not another movie that attempts to blow our brains away by means of disturbing material). This is rather a film about love, hope and, fuck you, what it means to be human. The film and novel both grapple with these themes in, what seems to me, an honest and sensitive way. The movie revolves around the duo's struggle with material existence. But the strength of the movie lies in its not separating this from the other themes - hope and love. Materiality never becomes "mere" materiality. The film (as does the novel) confronts us with questions about what it means to survive but that also brings with it questions about what it means to survive as moral beings.