The Road

Cormac McCarthy’s bleak post-apocalyptic thriller The Road was a surprise bestseller – spare, tender and devastating. Here Australian director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) faithfully recreates that story for the screen. A father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee from Romulus My Father) wander across an America that has been destroyed by some unnamed disaster. Ruined cities and dead forests are devoid of life, and where life survives it’s in the form of cannibal gangs who hunt human meat.

Into this grey world the boy has been born, and now the dying father is teaching to him to survive as they head towards the ocean and perhaps some kind of salvation. The future of kindness, humanity and hope all rest on the boy’s half-starved shoulders. It’s heart-wrenching, and flashbacks to the boy’s dead mother (Charlize Theron) underline the fact that even good people give up on this wretched existence.

At times The Road is almost unbearably tense and yes, bleak. But the experience is a beautiful and rewarding one, heightening our sense of how precious life is, and what we may lose if we destroy the conditions of our existence. And yes, there is hope.

Rochelle Siemienowicz
(This review first appeared in edition #346 of The Big Issue.

In the Valley of Elah

When Mike Deerfield (Jonathan Tucker) goes AWOL on his first weekend back from a tour of duty in Iraq, his father Hank (Tommy Lee Jones) doesn’t hesitate to join in the search. A former military policeman who served in Vietnam, Hank knows the kind of trouble a soldier can get in fresh back from a war. But as he investigates the disappearance alongside local detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), he soon realises that his son and the soldiers he was with are in more trouble than just another drunken weekend.

This might present itself as a searing indictment of how America throws away its fighting men, but only because writer/director Paul Haggis (Crash) does a solid job of hiding this film’s many cliches under a thick layer of topicality. The performances are strong, the characters are skillfully-written, the mystery ticks along nicely and the film’s atmosphere is suitably bleak. Basically, it’s a well-made crime film. But despite all of Haggis’ shrill and painfully obvious moralising, this is still little more than another clue-laden mystery being solved by a grizzled veteran and a sexy newcomer to the force.

Anthony Morris
(This review first appeared in The Big Issue, #298)