Venice ‘09: Early reviews split on Hillcoat’s ‘The Road’

John Hillcoat’s The Road

The 66th Venice Film Festival officially kicked off yesterday with the world premiere of Giuseppe Tornatore’s Sicilian epic Baaria and it got underway in earnest today with the world premieres of John Hillcoat’s highly anticipated adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road starring Viggo Mortensen and Todd Solondz’s sort of Happiness follow-up Life During Wartime.

I’ll have more about the other films later, but for now I wanted to note the critical reaction to The Road; for many the biggest film of the festival.

The Road. d: John Hillcoat
s: Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, Molly Parker and Garret Dillahunt

A man and his son make their way across a decimated, post-apocalyptic United States.

First the bad: Variety’s Todd McCarthy had some very specific expectations of the film and he found disappointment at every turn.

This “Road” leads nowhere. If you’re going to adapt a book like Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 bestseller, you’re pretty much obliged to make a terrific film or it’s not worth doing — first because expectations are high, and second, because the picture needs to make it worth people’s while to sit through something so grim. Except for the physical aspects of this bleak odyssey by a father and son through a post-apocalyptic landscape, this long-delayed production falls dispiritingly short on every front.

He adds that the film shows “clear signs of being test-screened and futzed with to death.”

The film’s style needed to be as terse, exacting, stripped-down, tough and precise as McCarthy’s prose style. The picture also should have been shocking, haunting and, at the end, deeply moving. As it is…[Hillcoat and his cinematographer Javier Aguirresrobe] have come up with some arresting scorched-earth vistas…but have missed the bigger picture almost entirely.

He didn’t like the screenplay:

Hillcoat…shows no talent for or inclination toward setting up a scene here; any number of sequences in “The Road” could have been very suspenseful if built up properly, but Hillcoat, working from a script by Joe Penhall, just hopscotches from scene to scene in almost random fashion without any sense of pacing or dramatic modulation.

He didn’t like the acting:

Dialogue that should have been directed with an almost Pinteresque sense of timing is delivered without meaningful shadings, principally by two actors who have no chemistry together.

He didn’t even like Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ score:

Score…borders on the treacly, softening the tone and further conventionalizing a film that should have gone the other direction toward something harsh and daring.

Writing for Screen Daily on the other hand, Fionnuala Halligan (Fionnuala…Manohla. Manohla…Fionnuala. Fionnuala…) acknowledges the film’s bleakness and she’s dubious about its box office potential, but she’s much more enthusiastic about it in artistic terms.

As heartbreaking on screen as it was on Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer-prize winning pages, The Road is an almost unbearably sad film, beautifully arranged and powerfully acted – a tribute to the array of talents involved. There is so much in this picture, from dread, horror, to suspense, bitterly moving love, extraordinary, Oscar-worthy art direction and a desperate lead performance from Viggo Mortensen which perfectly illustrates the wrenching desperation of parental love…anyone who sees it is unlikely to ever forget John Hillcoat’s (The Proposition) interpretation of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic planet where “each day is greyer than the one before.

Meanwile, The Guardian’s Xan Brooks calls it a “superb adaptation.”

What a haunting, harrowing, powerful film this is. Before last night’s premiere there were rumours that its lengthy post-production period (the movie was actually shot back in February 2008) spelled signs of a troubled, sickly production. By and large, those fears have now proved to be unfounded.

Admittedly, in dramatising McCarthy’s bare-bones prose, Hillcoat sometimes runs the risk of over-dramatising (I could have done without the plaintive music and the unnecessary slabs of explanatory voice-over). But no amount of window-dressing can distract from the tale’s pure, all-consuming horror.

Filed under: Film Festivals
Tags: Charlize Theron, Garret Dillahunt, Guy Pearce, Javier Agguirresrobe, Joe Penhall, John Hillcoat, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Molly Parker, Nick Cave, Robert Duvall, The Road, Venice Film Festival, Viggo Mortensen, Warren Ellis