If stories about the end of the world weren’t fun to explore, then there probably wouldn’t be so many of them. Think of The Walking Dead, for example. No one would really want to live in a zombie-filled postapocalyptic hellscape. But it can be very enjoyable to watch the human characters fight back and dispatch the walkers. The Road doesn’t have anything like that in its vision of the apocalypse. There are no zombies to kill, nor thrilling adventures. Instead, it’s one of the bleakest films to tackle the postapocalypse because it offers little hope for the audience or the main characters who have to live in this world.
That may be why audiences didn’t flock to see The Road when it hit 15 years ago this month. It only made a little over $8 million domestically and around $27 million worldwide against a $25 million budget. While those numbers don’t add up to a hit, it doesn’t mean that The Road didn’t leave a strong impression behind. It’s based on the book of the same name by Cormac McCarthy, the author who previously wrote No Country for Old Men. The film isn’t as highly regarded as the novel, but director John Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall still captured the essence of the story and the hard questions that go with it.
Make no mistake: The Road is an incredibly depressing story. Perhaps too depressing for most people. But there’s more than enough artistry in this film to appreciate it on its own terms rather than judging it for not following a more conventional path.
Viggo Mortensen gives an intense performance
As the two primary characters throughout the film, The Road belongs to Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as the unnamed father and his son. Both actors are excellent in their roles, but Mortensen deserves additional praise for the level of intensity that he brings to the role. The father is so wrapped up in his desire to protect his boy that he doesn’t always remember how to love him as a son.
Mortensen is probably best-known for his leading role in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, where he played an unambiguously heroic character named Aragorn. The father could not be further away from that persona.
Mortensen carries himself with a sense of desperation at all times, and there’s a wild look he gets in his eyes whenever anyone dares to approach him or his son. The father has good reasons to fear other people, and Mortensen makes the audience feel that during every potential threat or encounter.
Charlize Theron has a brief but memorable role
Mad Max: Fury Road‘s Charlize Theron doesn’t have a big role in The Road compared to Mortensen or Smit-McPhee. But she commands attention during her flashback sequences. Theron plays the boy’s mother and the wife of Mortensen’s character. Unlike her husband, the mother isn’t consumed with keeping the family together or even keeping herself alive. She simply wants out of this world on her own terms.
The mother has a larger part in the film than she does in the book, which is probably due to Theron’s status as a leading woman. It’s a change that was ultimately for the better.
Humanity is in short supply
The story gets a lot of tension out of the distrust that the father has for strangers, especially regarding the safety of his son. Unfortunately for the leading characters, the father has valid reasons to be so cautious. The first people they encounter in the film are exactly the kind of group that should be avoided at all costs. That leads to a scary moment where the father has to decide in a split second how he can protect his son and himself.
Because trust is in such short supply, the father doesn’t have much mercy for others… especially if they’ve dared to threaten his son or steal what little they have left. This is one of the reasons why the film is so hard to watch. The son occasionally makes his father show some humanity to others. But the breakdown of relationships between people as a species makes this a world that’s difficult to watch.
The ending offers more hope than the novel
We’re not going to spoil the specifics of the ending here, except to say that the conclusion of the book and the movie are pretty close except in one regard. There’s a person who is introduced in the book who makes certain claims about who he is and what he wants. Whether he was telling the truth may be more ambiguous in the text than it is on screen.
In the film, it’s less likely that this person was lying because he isn’t alone. Although that removes a lot of the uncertainty from the scene, it’s also the closest thing to a happy ending that this movie was ever going to get.
The Road is probably too bleak for repeated viewings, but it is an effective story that stands out from similar movies and TV shows. For that reason alone, we’d recommend watching it at least once.
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