ViewGuide

Created Dec 11, 2009 09:59AM PST • Edited Aug 27, 2013 08:32AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Very Good 3.5

   Think of this de facto zombie movie as No Country for Little Boys: a surreally grim milieu through which a dauntless Father must shepherd his pure-hearted Son. Such a nihilistic extravaganza creates ample opportunities for life lessons of the most extreme sort. The result is gripping, though a little wearying and dangerously close to ridiculous. (See Play and CircoReality below for why.)

   Fortunately it’s performed by great actors working at the top of their craft, directed with consummate skill and taken from a novel by a master of bleakness.
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   Random Note: You gotta wonder why more movies aren’t titled The Road. Aside from the iconic role of the road in so many movies, when buying a ticket you get to say “One for The Road.”

4. Acting

   Great 4.0

   Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron don’t always sell their many over-the-top emotional moments, though they inhabit their roles in full and with marked distinction, the hallmark of great movie acting. And they certainly have a memorable concert scene together. There’s a satisfied memory. Still, neither emotes especially well: Mortensen ain’t no Duvall, and Theron sure as hell ain’t no Streep.

   Speaking of Robert Duvall, he nails his cameo, his trademark quicksilver expressions devastatingly impactful through the crusted-over makeup he’s wearing. An all-time great, he wrings more emotion out of a facial tick than most actors get out of a death scene.

   Back to Mortensen, his criminal hero from Eastern Promises remains his perfect role, notwithstanding the praise this performance has garnered from some critics.

5. Male Stars Great 4.0

6. Female Stars Great 4.0

7. Female Costars Great 4.0

8. Male Costars Perfect 5.0

   Duvall

10. Film

    Very Good 3.5

    John Hillcoat directing from a Cormac McCarthy novel makes for a marriage made in Hell – a complement. Hillcoat’s brief oeuvre includes the cult classic Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, while McCarthy hit it big when the Coen Brothers adapted his No Country for Old Men into last year’s Best Picture.

11. Direction Great 4.0

    Massie says of Ghosts… of the Civil Dead that “The film builds into a horrid depressing rhythm and is just a masterclass in directing and editing.” The same can be said of The Road.

    On a lighter note, Hillcoat deftly establishes his story in the present by showing Father and Son guzzling XXX Vitamin Water. As it happens, I had taken a swig of XXX just prior to this scene. Cool.

12. Play Very Good 3.5

    Cormac McCarthy – a bleak master if ever there was one – here fashioned a world of unremitting evil, apparently in order to posit how one good man would make his way through it. For me, the moral fascination proved insufficient to overcome the mawkishness of the proceedings.

13. Music Very Good 3.5

14. Visuals Great 4.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Sordid 2.7

    The tangible threat of cannibalism – though more suggested than shown – certainly qualifies as Savage.

17. Sex Titillating 2.4

18. Violence Savage 4.0

19. Rudeness Salty 1.7

21. Reality

    Surreal 2.4

    The story plays like a worst case scenario as imagined by the secular Left: a soured environment mocks Man, and people are sources of harm rather than productivity. Do survivors seek spiritual sustenance in such a Hell? No. God is absent yet not missed.

    Of particular concern to the movie’s effectiveness, the unnamed calamity that destroys society seems to be a combination of inexplicable natural disaster and de facto zombification. So it plays like a zombie movie without the zombies. How convenient.

22. Circumstantial Surreal 3.0

    Wouldn’t you know it: Father and son always arrive just after people have been butchered, the blood still fresh. For years this keeps up…

23. Biological Surreal 2.1

24. Physical Surreal 2.1