What remains: The Road

The images that open The Road feature a leaf-lined branch warmed by the sun. Somewhere nearby stands a beautiful mother-to-be. Observing her is a handsome man stroking a horse. These fragments of a becalmed pastoral paradise are fleeting, vanishing as that same man wakes from his memory-laden dream. A handful of years have passed, perhaps seven, judging from the age of the boy who accompanies him, but the man appears to have aged decades, his face lined with grime-streaked gutters, his teeth half-rotted. Still, his transformation is nothing compared to that of the world he inhabits. The topography resembles a five-day beard on a wretched old man. Fires line the horizon, the sky’s an endless gloaming, and the colour green has forsaken us. Food is scarce, earthquakes are frequent, and what’s left of mankind has largely been reduced to foraging ghouls. At least there are still books. The man reads one to the boy. It catalogues animals, each of which is now presumed extinct.

The man (Viggo Mortensen) and boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) are making their way south, on foot, in beat-to-shit puffy coats, with dwindling supplies and a revolver with two bullets left, just enough to ensure double-suicide should some horrendous murder suddenly become a certainty. Those aching memories of fecund nature and familial blossoming are the last vestiges of warmth and beauty available to them, though the dying landscapes they pass through possess an undeniable fascination, at least for those of us just visiting for a couple of hours. The most commonplace items become miraculous here: shampoo, Coke, toothpaste, a can of pears. Their magic is intensified by the boy’s first-ever discovery of their comforts—he was born into this. The preservation of his innocence is all the man lives for, his answer to the question of why go on. His wife opted for suicide, along with most people with sense or dignity.

The book is from Cormac McCarthy, author of All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian and No Country For Old Men. Like No Country, The Road is a kind of western, the man with no name charged with chaperoning the boy through lawless terrain, their destination being the Gulf Coast and its vague promise of less hostile conditions for homesteading. Like the Coen Brothers’ film of No Country, The Road, scripted by Joe Penhall, is an unusually faithful literary adaptation, and director John Hillcoat, who last helmed The Proposition, easily one of the best westerns of the decade, offers a realization of McCarthy’s post-apocalypse that’s richly detailed, surprisingly suspenseful, and hauntingly vivid. A notable difference between the films of No Country and The Road however is that where the Coens nurtured atmosphere with an uncharacteristic paucity of scoring and voice-over, Hillcoat’s enlisted his old friends Nick Cave and Warren Ellis to supply the scoring, which is gorgeously mournful, so evocative as to be a sort of adaptation in itself. The problem being that there’s so much of it. Along with Mortensen’s weary voice-over—the pairing of disembodied voice and music recalls the films of Terrence Malick, The Thin Red Line in particular—the hypnotic score lulls us during scenes where we should ideally be alert to the tiniest, most nuanced sound, gesture, and image. It’s hardly the worst problem for a movie to have—an abundance of something beautiful and well crafted—but it does finally swath everything in a single tone, unintentionally protecting us from some harrowing moments.

Yet his central reservation of mine felt less important upon my second viewing of The Road, which allowed me to better forget the source material and focus more on the tremendous emotional connection between the brilliantly-cast Mortensen and the very natural, wide-eyed Smit-McPhee. During the second half I realized how, beneath the unfathomably bleak milieu, The Road is finally a story about father and son, about what a parent lives for and what a child tries to retain as he carries on alone. The accumulation of moments of desperate searching and running, of laughter and play—rare, but memorable—and of mutual learning about how to negotiate with the unruly world becomes resonant, and unforgettably moving. So see The Road, and then, perhaps, see it again. There’s something precious amidst all that darkness.

Appaloosa: this town isn't big enough for generic innovation, but some solid character work should fit quite cosily

The post-classical western characteristically concerns a world in transition, but just as every trail must reach its terminal point, the genre lends itself equally well to tales of lives in transition, especially the end of male friendships. Based on the novel by Robert B. Parker, Appaloosa begins with Virgil Cole (Ed Harris) and Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen) entering the eponymous town, still in its infancy, and thus easily overrun by opportunistic criminals. Both being men of few words, the town tamers’ arrival is accompanied by voice-over from Everett that immediately hints at Appaloosa’s role as a catalyst in their partnership, and the subsequent appearance of the widow Allison French (René Zellwegger) clearly seals the deal: she catches Virgil’s eye, and the elder gunfighter’s dormant urges toward domestication rise to the surface, softening his ruddy face and pale eyes and spelling the end of something as surely as the beginning.

The first film helmed by Harris since Pollock, his striking, bleak-poetic biopic and directorial debut, Appaloosa feels like a throwback, making few attempts to depart from the western’s established vernacular. Yet as these characters develop, as these actors flesh them out, and especially as the subtly sophisticated dynamics of their relationships inform the proceedings, it seems as though Appaloosa actually benefits from its comfort with generic tropes: by situating us in familiar territory, Harris help us focus on the details.

As embodied by Harris with transparent inner turmoil, Virgil’s flustered response to Allison’s presence is endearing, as are his attempts to culture himself by reading Emerson and checking with Everett every time he tries out some newly acquired vocabulary. Heightened by Mortensen’s remarkable ability to convey multiple agendas in concert, Everett’s guardedness around Allison makes an intriguing counterpoint, especially once she begins to reveal her true colours, a habit of zeroing in on whichever man seems to be “the boss stallion.” Her opportunism finally feels less like a punishable character defect than a perfectly honorable survival technique for any single, no-longer-young woman trying to eek out some kind of security in the untamed west. Zellwegger feels miscast here, less able to exhibit Allison’s extremes of beguiling and repelling than other, less ingratiating or mannered actresses, yet crucially, she never seems to judge her character, and her conflicted desires remain sympathetic.

The A-story of Appaloosa, in which Virgil and Everett contend with a corrupt, weak-willed establishment while trying to run the local, foreign-accented nasty (Jeremy Irons, suitably nasty) out of town, functions well enough, but is most interesting as a backdrop to the more diverting and subtext-dependent story of Virgil and Everett’s long goodbye. There is however a wonderful showdown scene that passes with brutal quickness and decidedly unceremonious bloodletting. “Everyone could shoot,” Harris’ Virgil offers by way of blackly humorous explanation. He could just as easily be referring to his considerable directorial skills. I don’t suspect he’ll win over as many admirers with his sophomore effort, but in the long view I believe Appaloosa, with its complex moral-twisting culminating in a memorable final sequence, will stand-up as a solid part of Harris’ hopefully still-growing directorial filmography.

The Promise of future collaborations: tracing the progress of the Cronenberg Mortensen merger

Right from its opening moments, Eastern Promises flows with painful, unruly rites of parturition, initiation, desecration and earthly departure. It opens with a gruesome killing, a premature birth and the tragic, confused expiration of the girl whose diary will come to haunt the film and its personae. It features bodies being branded, decapitated, displayed and disguised, as well as an attempted assassination in which the intended victim fights for his life while stark naked, a bravura sequence worth the asking price alone.

If the above reads as a particularly body conscious series of images, it’ll come as little surprise to savvy filmgoers that the director of Eastern Promises is David Cronenberg. But what’s so fascinating about Cronenberg’s progress is the way in which his films virtually always reveal something of his distinctive approach and ongoing preoccupations even when their milieus seem virtually antithetical to his established horror/sci-fi background. Set amidst London’s Russian underworld, Eastern Promises would appear even farther from Cronenberg’s comfort zone than A History of Violence, yet he brings to the proceedings more than confidence –he brings the careful gaze of one of the most passionately curious and unusual minds in movies.

Hospital midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) has in her care a newborn without a mother or even a name. All Anna has to assist her in identifying the child is a diary written in Russian and a business card that leads her to a fatherly, blue-eyed restaurateur named Seymon (Armin Mueller-Stahl). The more sinister aspect of Seymon makes itself known soon enough, not the least through Anna’s increasing familiarity with Seymon’s obnoxious, alcoholic and reckless son Kirill (a particularly flamboyant Vincent Cassel) and the family’s stoic chauffer Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen). The diary and its inflammatory contents serve as a sort of Pandora’s box, functioning both as Anna’s entrée into a dark, socially cloistered realm of immigrant crime, and as a way of flushing Nikolai out of this darkness and into a conundrum of urgent moral dilemma.

Written by Stephen Knight, Eastern Promises is a taut, layered thriller akin in many regards to his terrific script for Dirty Pretty Things. Cronenberg’s points of connection are so varied and surprising, his reigning in of the material so clean that, as with Spider in particular, the places where the screenwriter’s hand departs and the director’s takes over are untraceable. Pleasingly, Cronenberg’s work of the 2000s is consistently characterized by this honing his own voice through fruitful collaboration rather than strict –and potentially stifling– traditional hyphenate autuerism.

Yet Cronenberg’s most notable partner-in-crime these days is surely Mortensen, who gives a flawlessly committed performance here as an intriguing variation on the man who can’t escape his violent past he already inhabited so deftly in A History of Violence. Though he’s introduced as a vampire-groomed thug who unflinchingly butts out smokes on his tongue before going about his duties snapping frozen digits off a corpse like so many fish fingers, his Nikolai is a collage of masks and interior conflicts that emerge gradually as his allegiance to Seymon and his involvement in Anna’s quest become mutually compromised. More even than Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, Mortensen has become Cronenberg’s ideal alter ego, an impressively pliable, imposingly muscular junction of raw physicality, prowling anxiety, complicated sexuality and shrewd intellect. And, in any case, he’s just amazing in this film.

We can only hope for more from this pairing, though the truth is that where Cronenberg might go from here is delightfully unpredictable and may or may not include further suitable roles for Mortensen. Perhaps he’ll borrow a page from the Scorsese-De Niro book and allow Mortensen to mature into a genuine chameleon –a feat which in itself would fit nicely into Cronenberg’s ongoing study of malleable identity and the monster within.