The Road (2009)

Nominated for 1 BAFTA Award
- 5 wins & 34 nominations total

Trivia
To live the role, Viggo Mortensen would sleep in his clothes and deliberately starve himself. At one point, he was thrown out of a shop in Pittsburgh, because they thought he was a homeless man.

Goofs
The "current" portion of the movie takes place approximately 7-8 years after the "disaster" happened that caused all plant life to die off. If all plant life had died off, there would be no dry grass shooting from the soil, nor dead grass lying on the ground especially with all the weather turmoil happening around. All leaves and dried grass would have decomposed in that amount of time. Furthermore, trees would not have dried leaves hanging from the branches.

Quotes
The Man: Do you ever wish you would die?
Old Man: No. It's foolish to ask for luxuries in times like these.

Crazy credits
Over the end credits, we hear the sounds of children playing. What the world must have been like in happier times.

Connections
Featured in At the Movies: Venice Film Festival 2009 (2009)

Soundtracks
Sonata for Violin and Harpsichord No. 3 in E Major: Adagio Ma Non Tanto
Written by Johann Sebastian Bach (as J.S. Bach)
Arranged by Ryan Franks
Performed by Ryan Franks & Harry Scorzo
Courtesy of Crucial Music Corporation

Faithful adaptation that still offers something new

Just got back from seeing THE ROAD.

I had been very impressed by the novel and was concerned about how it would be adapted. The tone of the novel is almost unremittingly bleak and a 100% faithful adaptation would be very difficult to watch.

I'm happy to report that the film is very good indeed. It solves the problem of being unendurably depressing by concentrating on the emotional impact of the unspecified Armageddon, rather than the day to day fight for food, shelter and so on. So while at times it remains very upsetting it is shot through with hope rather than despair. I always felt the end of the novel was somewhat out of kilter with the rest of it but in the film it seems quite appropriate.

I think the film is more about the collapse of civility rather than civilization: for a film that shows the last remnants of mankind struggling to eke out an existence it is remarkably concerned with relationships. That's probably why the exact cause of the catastrophe is left blank: the film isn't really about the end of the world so much as the end of society. It's an interesting companion piece to NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN in which an ageing man sees nothing but horror in the modern world. In THE ROAD a man convinces himself, for the sake of his son, that humanity will abide even in the face of appalling conditions.