The Road Reception Mixed

After screening last night in Venice, a few reviews of John Hillcoat’s adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel, The Road. The first is good — Geoffrey McNab writing for the Independent:

In the event, John Hillcoat has made a film of power and sensitivity that works remarkably well on the big screen. It plays like a Dystopian version of Huck Finn. “Tattered gods slouching in their rags across the waste,” was how McCarthy described the father and son on their grim odyssey south across America toward the coast.

The film captures well the strange mix of heroism and seeming futility that characterises the journey. What is most impressive is the restraint the filmmakers bring to their material. The look of the film is muted and grey other than in the flashbacks to the pre-apocalyptic moments that the man (Viggo Mortensen) enjoyed with his wife (Charlize Theron) before the world ground to a halt.

The music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is likewise understated. We don’t hear Cave wailing out murder ballads. Instead, the score is used in ominous but understated fashion to accentuate the feeling of loss and foreboding that runs throughout the film.

Next, Variety’s Todd McCarthy is having none of it. He finds it a disappointment:

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. Showing clear signs of being test-screened and futzed with to death, the Dimension release may receive a measure of respect in some quarters but is very, very far from the film it should have been, spelling moderate to tepid B.O. prospects after big fest preems.

Finally, Lee Marshall for the Evening Standard comes down somewhere in the middle:

McCarthy’s novel worked partly because of what it left to the imagination. The film leaves nothing to the imagination — not even a cellarful of desperate human cattle who are being kept alive for slaughter. So although Joe Penhall’s script is remarkably faithful to the original, it doesn’t feel quite right. The film is bleak and visionary, but it leaves a faintly nasty taste in the mouth, as if it wanted to rope in the horror fans under its arthouse cloak