John Hillcoat
The Road

The film by John Hillcoat, based on Cormac McCarthy's novel, is a faithful yet monotonous rendition of the novel's atmosphere.

I came to watch the film after much delay: it won't be released in cinemas in Italy (too depressing for distributors), as theaters are all occupied by reassuring stories and/or comedies where the family and pats on the back make everyone see life as something painless, slightly amusing, and bittersweet.

Viewing the film on my laptop certainly did not do justice to the splendid cinematography, the attention to sound, and the recreation of a world deprived of any possibility of life and hope.

The images are accompanied by an ominous droning sound: noises of falling trees, the crackling of dying embers, a powerful rumble reverberating in the distance.

In this, the film proves to be more disturbing and even more desperate than the book, without McCarthy's florid language to elevate the horror to a mystical and elegiac level.

The performances by the actors (especially Mortensen) are anguished and extremely realistic. Everything is blanketed by dirt and ash, there are bodies occupying the roads, bands of cannibals raiding the land.

However, what surprises is the director's choice to omit certain truly gruesome parts of the book to "domesticate" the vision and not displease anyone. As if the sight of a woman and her son being chased and killed by a pack were more tolerable than the infamous child on the spit, the explosive escalation of the novel’s final chapters.

There is one scene above all that, objectively, explains why there is so much animosity in America towards a film like this: the father and the son enter a large Victorian house, there are piles of shoes and clothes around, they go down to the basement to search for food and find a group of wretched, semi-nude people, with severed limbs, imprisoned to satisfy the hunger of the stronger group.

I don't know why the United States, home to the most extreme and now mainstream pornography, the kind that will overflow from our PCs to overwhelm us all, is so afraid to explore a grim yet real aspect of human life: the violence of the similar against the similar. Perhaps the fear of looking in the mirror has led, not only in the U.S., to this film being in some sense "banned" from main circuits, to plunge into the safe distribution on DVD.

The film, I repeat, is not at the level of the novel, but it gradually transforms into a true open-eyed nightmare as the viewing progresses. The comforting ending is not enough to save the descent we make with the protagonists to the sea... in this, the anticlimax is masterful as our two "heroes" scale the last dunes and are faced with a gray and dead horizon, the beach filled with skeletons and debris.

Even in this film, there is a "pornographic" element, perhaps it is the impossible attempt to visually render a real despair and the cosmic void of a world where everything is lost.

A few days after seeing the film, there was the earthquake in Haiti, curious and inevitable how certain images, and certain stories, brought me back to this film, spectral and mortiferous in its honest, desperate monotony.