The Road (2009 film)

The Road
Promotional poster
Directed by	John Hillcoat
Written by	Joe Penhall (screenplay) Cormac McCarthy (book)
Produced by	Nick Wechsler Steve Schwartz Paula Mae Schwartz
Starring	Viggo Mortensen Kodi Smit-McPhee Michael K. Williams Robert Duvall Guy Pearce and Charlize Theron
Cinematography	Javier Aguirresarobe
Edited by	Jon Gregory
Music by	Nick Cave Warren Ellis
Production company	2929 Productions
Distributed by	Dimension Films The Weinstein Company
Release date	November 25, 2009 (limited)
Running time	111 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$25 million
Box office	$23,495,382(FAIL)

The Road is a 2009 drama film directed by John Hillcoat and written by Joe Penhall. Based on the 2006 novel of the same name by American author Cormac McCarthy, the film stars Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as a father and his son in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Filming took place in Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and Oregon. The film received a limited release in North American cinemas from November 25, 2009 and was released in UK cinemas on January 4, 2010.

Plot

The Road shares the premise of the novel on which it is based: a father (Mortensen) and his young son (Smit-McPhee) struggle to survive a number of years after a devastating cataclysm has destroyed civilization, killed most plant and animal life, and obscured the sun. Although the disaster itself is never named, the world is in a state of nuclear winter. Only remnants of mankind remain alive, reduced to scavenging or cannibalism. Man and boy, both unnamed, are traveling southward, in the hope that it will be warmer. Along the way, they search for shelter, food, and fuel, and avoid bands of cannibals while trying to maintain their own sense of humanity. The man carries a revolver, but has only two bullets which he seems to want to keep in case they need to commit suicide. Flashback and dream sequences spaced throughout the narrative show how the man's wife, who has a much more expanded role in the film than in the book, committed suicide after losing the will to go on in a seemingly doomed world.

Events occur along the way that add additional stresses to the man and his son. After shooting a member of a cannibal gang, the man is left with only one bullet in his gun. Later, the pair enter a large house, and discover it to be inhabited by cannibals who are keeping live victims in the basement and farming their limbs. Believing they will be caught, the man prepares to shoot his son, to spare him the torments, but the cannibals are distracted and they escape. Further down the road they find a house with an underground shelter full of canned food, which they feast on, but the man is too nervous to stay in one spot for long. They later encounter an old, dying man, (Robert Duvall) and the son encourages his initially reluctant father to converse with the man and feed him. After arriving at the coast, their camp is robbed. They catch the thief (Michael K. Williams) and the man forces him to strip, leaving him naked by the road. As they pass through a ruined town, the man is shot on the leg with an arrow and he retaliates by killing his attacker.

The father suffers from persistent coughing during the film, eventually coughing up blood. After they reach the coast his condition deteriorates and he realizes he is likely to die soon. On his death bed he again emphasizes to his son the values of self-preservation and humanity. After the father dies, the son is approached by another family—a father, mother, two children and a dog—who, it is revealed, have been following the man and his son for some time out of concern for the boy. The boy agrees to join up with them.

Cast

• Viggo Mortensen as the Man. Mortensen explained the interaction of the father with his son thus: "They’re on this difficult journey, and the father is basically learning from the son."
• Kodi Smit-McPhee as the Boy. At the London Film Festival, Mortensen explained that Smit-McPhee was one of four finalists for the part, all of whom then read with him. Smit-McPhee was unanimously chosen, in particular because he seemed youthful, innocent and yet wise beyond his years.
• Charlize Theron as the Wife, who appears in flashback. Theron joined the film because she was a fan of the book and had previously worked with producer Nick Wechsler on the 2000 film The Yards. The character has a larger role in the film than in the book. Hillcoat said of the expanded role, "I think it's fine to depart from the book as long as you maintain the spirit of it."
• Michael K. Williams as a thief.
• Robert Duvall as Ely, an old, dying man.
• Guy Pearce as a father wandering with his family.
• Molly Parker as his wife.

Production

Filmmakers sought to implement bleak scenery as the backdrop of post-apocalyptic America for the characters' journey

In November 2006, producer Nick Wechsler used independent financing to acquire film rights to adapt the 2006 novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy. When Wechsler had watched John Hillcoat's 2005 film The Proposition after reading The Road, the producer decided to pursue Hillcoat to direct the film adaptation. Wechsler described Hillcoat's style: "There was something beautiful in the way John captured the stark primitive humanity of the West in that movie." In April 2007, Joe Penhall was hired to script the adapted screenplay. Wechsler and his fellow producers Steve and Paula Mae Schwartz planned to have a script and an actor cast to portray the father before pursuing a distributor for the film. By the following November, actor Viggo Mortensen had entered negotiations with the filmmakers to portray the father, though he was occupied with filming Appaloosa in New Mexico.

With a budget of $20 million, filming began in southwestern Pennsylvania in late February 2008 for eight weeks and moved on to Louisiana and Oregon. Hillcoat preferred to shoot in real locations, saying "We didn't want to go the CGI world." Pennsylvania, where most of the filming took place, was chosen for its tax breaks and its abundance of locations that looked abandoned or decayed: coalfields, dunes, and run-down parts of Pittsburgh. Filming was also done at the 1892 amusement resort (Conneaut Lake Park) after one of the park's buildings (the Dreamland Ballroom) was destroyed in a fire in February 2008. The beaches of Presque Isle State Park in Erie, Pennsylvania were also used. Hillcoat also said of using Pittsburgh as a practical location, "It's a beautiful place in fall with the colors changing, but in winter, it can be very bleak. There are city blocks that are abandoned. The woods can be brutal." Filmmakers also shot scenes in parts of New Orleans that had been ravaged by Hurricane Katrina and on Mount St. Helens in Washington.

Hillcoat sought to make the film faithful to the spirit of the book, creating "a world in severe trauma", although never explaining the circumstances of the apocalyptic event. According to Hillcoat, "That's what makes it more realistic, then it immediately becomes about survival and how you get through each day as opposed to what actually happened." Filmmakers took advantage of days with bad weather to portray the post-apocalyptic environment. Mark Forker, the director of special effects for the film, sought to make the landscape convincing, handling sky replacement and digitally removing greenery from scenes.

The Abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike was used for much of the production.

Release

Actors Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee, screenwriter Joe Penhall, director John Hillcoat and producer Steve Schwartz at the 2009 Venice Film Festival.

The Road was originally scheduled to be released in November 2008. It was pushed back to be released in December, and then pushed back a second time to sometime in 2009. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the studio decided that the film would benefit from a longer post-production process and a less crowded release calendar. A new release date was scheduled for October 16, 2009. However, according to reports from Screen Rant and /Film, the Weinsteins had decided at the last minute to delay the film to November 25, 2009 as a possible move to make the film more of an Oscar contender, bumping their previous film set for that date, Rob Marshall's adaptation of the musical Nine (which is also predicted to be a huge awards contender) into December 2009.

The film had its world premiere in September 2009 at the Venice International Film Festival where it was in competition for the Golden Lion and Silver Lion prizes, and then at the Telluride Film Festival. It also screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The DVD and Blu-Ray release is set for the 25th May 2010 in the United States.

Reception

The film currently holds a 76% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 167 reviews. It also has a score of 64/100 on Metacritic, based on 32 reviews, indicating generally positive reviews from critics.

Esquire's Tom Chiarella screened the film before it was released and called it "a brilliantly directed adaptation of a beloved novel, a delicate and anachronistically loving look at the immodest and brutish end of us all. You want them to get there, you want them to get there, you want them to get there—and yet you do not want it, any of it, to end." He also referred to it as "the most important movie of the year." IGN's James O'Connor gave it four and a half out of a possible five stars, stating "One of the most important and moving films to come along in a long time."

In an early review, The Guardian film critic Xan Brooks gave the film four stars out of five, and described it as "a haunting, harrowing, powerful film," with Mortensen "perfectly cast" as the Man.

Luke Davies of The Monthly described the film as "gorgeous, in a horrible way, but its greater coolness and distance shows just how difficult it can be to translate to screen the innate psychic warmth of great literature." Davies suggested the film's flaws "might have to do with the directorial point of view—it all feels too detached, in a way that the book in its searing intimacy does not", concluding that the film has "too much tableau and not enough acting."

A review in Adbusters disapproved of the apparent product placement in the film, but, as noted by Hillcoat, the references to Coca-Cola appear in the novel, and the company was in fact reluctant about the product being portrayed in the film.

Awards and nominations

Award	Year	Category	Result	Cast/Crew
Washington DC Area Film Critics Association Awards	2009	Best Actor	Nominated	Viggo Mortensen
		Best Screenplay, Adapted	Nominated	Joe Penhall
Venice Film Festival	2009		Nominated	John Hillcoat
Toronto Film Critics Association	2009	Best Actor	Nominated	Viggo Mortensen
Utah Film Critics Association	2009	Best Actor	Won	Viggo Mortensen
Houston Film Critics Society	2009	Best Actor	Nominated	Viggo Mortensen
Satellite Awards	2009	Best Art Direction & Production Design	Nominated	Chris Kennedy
San Diego Film Critics Society Awards	2009	Best Actor	Nominated	Viggo Mortensen
		Best Cinematography	Won	Javier Aguirresarobe
Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards	2010	Best Actor	Nominated	Viggo Mortensen
		Best Young Actor/Actress	Nominated	Kodi Smit-McPhee
		Best Makeup	Nominated
BAFTA Awards	2010	Best Cinematography	Nominated	Javier Aguirresarobe

External links

• Official website
• The Road at IMDb
• The Road at AllMovie
• Photo gallery at USA Today
• Filming The Road