On “The Road” with John Hillcoat

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 02:01:00 +0000

John Hillcoat spent many years honing his craft with music videos and struggling to get feature projects launched. So his emergence in 2006 with the stylish, startling and violent Aussie western "The Proposition" -- scripted by singer-songwriter Nick Cave, an old friend and current neighbor -- wasn't as sudden as it appeared to be. (It was actually his third feature.) That film's depiction of a memorably harsh environment brought Hillcoat to the attention of producer Nick Wechsler, who was planning an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic father-son parable, "The Road."

Hillcoat's resulting film (scripted by British playwright Joe Penhall) has already been touted this year as an Oscar contender, which is remarkable when you consider that its characters have no names and its color scheme -- a few momentary digressions aside -- features steely gray, dark gray and pale gray. Indeed, the sun-baked 19th-century outback of "The Proposition" is like a summer garden party on the Seine compared to the world of "The Road," which has been devastated by an unexplained nuclear or environmental catastrophe that has killed off nearly all life, plunged the planet into endless winter and reduced human society to pure atavism.

“The Road”: Post-apocalypse now

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 01:01:00 +0000

John Hillcoat's "The Road" is an honorable adaptation of a piece of pulp fiction disguised as high art; it a has more directness and more integrity than its source material, the 2006 novel by Cormac McCarthy. Viggo Mortensen plays a father -- he is referred to only as the Man -- wandering a post-apocalyptic world with his son, the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee). This is a world in which the unthinkable has happened, although it's never specified exactly what the unthinkable is: All we see are the effects. All animals have apparently died, and plant life is on the way out, too. Cities and towns lay abandoned and crumbled. And the roads, once so carefully built by man as the connective tissue of civilization, are now trolled by marauding redneck cannibals who have lost every vestige of humanity. In "The Road" the Man isn't just teaching his son how to survive, foraging for food and the like, but teaching him to preserve the very things that make him -- that make us -- human.

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On “The Road” with John Hillcoat

“The Road”: Post-apocalypse now