The Road (2009)

Some books are just not filmable, and yet they get the Hollywood treatment anyway. I thought Cormac McCarthy’s spectacular novel “The Road” fit the profile: It’s a devastatingly bleak story about the end of civilization, a dying father who loves his son so much he’s willing to kill him, and the light – “the fire,” it is written – that the child holds within him. Biblical themes explode on the page, and to this reader’s eyes, define the book. The film version is surprisingly good, but soul-sucking bleak, with no saving grace from McCarthy’s prose to pull us through the muck and mire. Muck and mire and ash abound as an unnamed father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) travel through a dead America toward the Atlantic Ocean. They flee cannibals and thieves, while finding the occasional straggler to help. It is the boy who always wants to help for the father trusts no one. Director John Hillcoat (“The Proposition”) paints a vision of hell on earth like no other I’ve seen before, and the acting is shockingly realistic, with Mortensen looking starved, ragged and near-dead. If the last scene is a bit disjointed, sudden and weirdly happy, it is because what is written cannot always be shown. It simply must be read. And only read. B+