None More Black

THE INUITS may not actually have 100 words for snow, but
Cormac McCarthy knows at least 500 for gloom. McCarthy’s 2006
Pulitzer-winning, Oprah-approved, post-apocalyptic saga The Road might not be his finest work—in my mind, that honor still goes to
the astoundingly baroque Blood Meridian—but it’s almost
certainly his most focused, with virtually every sentence conveying
some new detail of utter desolation, all rendered great and terrible by
the author’s neo-biblical prose. (Phrases like, “He rose and stood
tottering in that cold autistic dark… while the vestibular
calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings” may confound
linguistically, but taken on an emotional, cumulative level, it’s just,
like, whoa.) After reading it, everything seems strange for a
while, like watching the world through a depressive’s View-Master.

Arriving after delays and rumors of recuts, the long-awaited
cinematic version comes off as a non-starter; an honorable, respectful,
well-acted adaptation that feels curiously inert. All the beats are
there—with the exception of a few of the most notoriously grisly
bits—but the chaos seems a little too orderly.

Director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) retains McCarthy’s
somber melding of Mad Max, Dawn of the Dead, and the
Lone Wolf and Cub series, with unnamed Man (Viggo Mortensen) and
Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) trudging through the remains of America toward
the ocean while avoiding roving packs of cannibals. (Seen only in
flashback, the Woman gets a little bit more to do in the movie than in
the book, possibly because she’s played by Charlize Theron.)

On a performance level, Hillcoat’s film succeeds, with the genuine
chemistry between the two leads bolstered by brief but strong
appearances from Guy Pearce, The Wire‘s Michael K. Williams, and
an agreeably hambone Robert Duvall. (Special credit goes, as it often
does these days, to Garret Dillahunt, who creates an indelible
boogeyman in maybe a minute of screentime.) Where The Road stumbles, unfortunately—and perhaps inevitably—is in its
attempts to adequately reproduce the book’s thunderously grim, somehow
cleansing vision. McCarthy’s basic theme of the grinding inevitable
broken up only by brief moments of happiness (including the best cameo
by a Coke machine since Dr. Strangelove) remains, but Hillcoat’s
noble effort ultimately falls under the category of things much better
imagined than seen. Instead of The End of All That Is, this is, well,
just a movie.