The Man and the Boy - Viggo Mortensen, in a beautifully calibrated performance, and Kodi Smit-McPhee, unself-consciously mastering a range of intense emotions - are "heading south for the Coast." That sounds like a pleasant enough excursion, until you look at the terrain they must cross: denuded forests, abandoned, ash-coated highways, old houses strewn with corpses - a landscape of rot and emptiness, godless, gray.
A marvel of production design - the wasted Interstates, the graffitied billboards, the body parts wedged under burnt cars - The Road offers a bleak but soulful allegory about survival, about the bonds between parent and child. Scripted by the British playwright Joe Penhall, using McCarthy's precise staccato prose as a model, The Road is, well, a road movie, a journey from Point A to Point B, with the good, the bad, and the ugly encountered along the way. There are challenges to face, decisions to be made.
Shot mostly in rugged pockets of western Pennsylvania and on the shores of Lake Erie, the film, somber and spooky, is in constant danger of slipping into self-parody: Zombieland, after all, uses a similar postapocalyptic template - a small band of survivors on the run from flesh-eating subhumans - and it's way more fun. But Hillcoat, director of the scruffily biblical Australian western The Proposition, keeps the focus on Mortensen and Smit-McPhee: dragging their shopping cart of belongings across the desolation, huddling together in the cold, the father trying to teach his son about good and evil, right and wrong. (It's impossible to watch The Road and not think about the plight of the homeless in our cities and country today - for many, a personal apocalypse is already here.)
