The Road — Timing is everything, especially when it comes to the end of the world as we know it. It’s not The Road’s fault it arrives in theaters a mere two weeks after Roland Emmerich turned the apocalypse into the world’s biggest amusement-park ride; in fact, John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was originally due in theaters a year ago. Hillcoat’s film would have been a hard sell regardless of its release date, but it’s especially difficult to imagine moviegoers carving time into their Thanksgiving weekend for two solid hours of gray, grim despair.
Working with a script by Joe Penhall, Hillcoat (The Proposition) has crafted an adaptation that is faithful to McCarthy in much the same way Zack Snyder’s Watchmen was faithful to Alan Moore’s graphic novel: the individual scenes are recognizable, the dialogue is often lifted word-for-word… and yet something vital is missing, as if we are watching moving illustrations from a book rather than a movie with a life of its own. Both novel and film begin some years after an unnamed catastrophe has devastated America (and presumably the rest of the world), leaving a charred, blackened landscape littered with the rubble of civilization.
Among the small handful of human survivors are a man and his son (Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee) — filthy, bedraggled, and pushing all their worldly possessions in a shopping cart. They are slowly making their way south in an effort to stay ahead of deadly freezing temperatures — not to mention roaming bands of cannibalistic scavengers. Although they occasionally encounter others in their travels — notably a nearly blind and crippled old man played by an almost unrecognizable Robert Duvall — the bulk of the film consists of father and son bonding as they slog alone through an unremittingly bleak landscape (with the occasional flashback featuring Charlize Theron as Mortensen’s wife).
It’s barely a story, but McCarthy’s novel didn’t win prizes for its Swiss-watch plotting; the book derives much of its power from its near-biblical use of language — what Janet Maslin of the New York Times called “pure poetic brimstone.” If it’s not quite unfilmable (as McCarthy’s Blood Meridian has so far proven to be), it certainly cries out for a singular talent capable of translating the author’s striking prose into the visual language of film. Whoever that might be — Werner Herzog? Terrence Malick? — it’s not Hillcoat, whose gloomy visuals only occasionally transcend an overly literal approach, leaving us stranded on a dreary road to nowhere.
Me and Orson Welles — Zac Efron is Richard Samuels, a 1930s high-school student who befriends Mercury Theater honcho Orson Welles (Christian McKay) in Richard Linklater’s lightly comedic mix of coming-of-age story and classic backstage intrigue, reviewed here when it played SXSW earlier this year.
Old Dogs — More like Old Hams. John Travolta and Robin Williams team up to play business partners unexpectedly charged with the care of twin seven-year-olds in this must-avoid comedy of the season from Wild Hogs director Walt Becker.
Ninja Assassin — An orphan is raised by an ancient secret society to become — what else? — an ass-kicking ninja assassin, who turns against his masters to aid an Interpol agent. James McTeigue (V for Vendetta) directs.
