Cormac McCarthy long has been one of my favorite authors. A dark background was one of the attributes that held my interest, and his Tennessee-set stories like "Suttree" were just as powerful as the Western yarns like "Blood Meridian" and the three books that made up the so-called "Border Trilogy." "No Country for Old Men" was a fine book, a better movie. But I put down "The Road" before I was half finished, and I was strongly tempted to leave the movie version at about the same point.
"The Road" will undoubtedly draw some rave reviews, and I did find Viggo Mortensen's acting to be stunning. But the unrelieved gloom in the vision of a post-Apocalyptic world through the eyes of McCarthy, screenplay writer Joe Penhall and director John Hillcoat was just too depressing for me.
Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee are a father and son in this empty, dying world, filmed in post-Katrina New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, in the abandoned coal mines of Pennsylvania and other equally-gloomy parts of our nation, ravaged by man-made or nature-created disasters. They are traveling somewhere, fueled by force of habit and dreams in technicolor, of the days when the family was complete, with Charlize Theron as wife/mother. They have a revolver with two bullets and Mortensen provides suicide instructions to the boy, who keeps asking his father, "Are we the good guys?" in a search for reinforcement.
And in the end, my problem with "The Road" is that the never-ending quest becomes, well, monotonous, and when you're in the theater, in a seat, there is no worse sin than boredom, and that's where Hillcoat falls short,.
"The Road" opens today at The Tivoli
-Joe