We here at The Sunday Times were big fans of The Road - our own Cosmo Landesman giving the film a glowing four star review having been struck, as a father himself, by the Man/Boy relationship. His praise was fulsome, summing up the John Hillcoat movie as "one of that rare breed of remarkable films — like Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto — that, once you’ve seen it, you would be quite happy never to see again. Then again, it’s so good you won’t need to."
Critics the world over agreed they would be happy to never see The Road again. However, for many, that was because they thought it less Route 66, more North Circular. Less cruising down a Pacific Highway, more bank holiday on the M25. You get the picture.
AO Scott’s New York Times review is a fine example of the “drizzle and greyness” which pervades many critics’ reactions to post-apocalyptic The Road, as well as the film itself. For Scott, the film is an “earnest, literary Oscar aspirant”; in other words, he is suspicious of its motivations and although he praises certain parts he really can’t find much love for the film as a whole, since it is “hampered by compromises and half-measures”. Ouch.
As with many other critics who all too eager to point out that they've read the book, Scott makes a distinction between the original Cormac McCarthy novel and the long-delayed - it was meant to be released well over a year ago - Hollywood awards-fodder: “The difference is that the father is fighting not to lose his son, while the filmmakers are striving not to lose an audience.”
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There is similar polite distaste from Le Monde’s reviewer Thomas Sotinel. The Frenchman offers that whereas the ending of The Road The Book “could bring a certain relief”, in the film this “takes on a more worrying form […] which candy-coats the journey”. Linking the movie to the US’s recent turmoils and troubles, Sotinel diagnoses the landscapes as “those of post-industrial America: Pennsylvania’s coalmining countryside, New Orleans after Katrina, forests wracked by acid rain”. Pertinent point or wishful thinking? Either way, few other critics make the connection so Monsieur Sotinel is either very clever or just a bit of a poser.
Perhaps the “greyest” of all reviews is the great Roger Ebert’s, for Chicago Sun-Times. Ebert says the film “lacks [a] core of emotional feeling”, but as to why: “I’m not sure this is any fault of the filmmakers”. Likewise, later, “I am not sure the characters could be played better, or differently”. He is stumped by a movie whose source material casts too long a shadow: “Perhaps” – again, just ‘perhaps’ – “McCarthy, like Faulkner, is all but unfilmable”. News that may surprise the Coen Brothers.
If Ebert is uncertain about how the whole thing should have been done, Todd McCarthy at Variety has no such qualms. First of all: “This ‘Road’ leads nowhere”. Next: it shows “clear signs of being test-screened and futzed with to death”. As for Hillcoat and his team: “[they]… have come up with some arresting scorched-earth vistas… but have missed the bigger picture almost entirely”. The director and his cast also have no mastery of dialogue, and that applies even to child actor Kodi Smit-McPhee. While the youngster gets warm plaudits from everyone else, McCarthy has little time for the nipper: “the boy’s readings are blandly on the nose”. Take it on the chin Kodi. It'll help you grow.
For Slate’s critic Dana Stevens, the question is this: “does extreme experience equal great art?” She can’t deny the film’s harrowing effect, but “spiritually draining” as this is, “the same could be said about watching pigs get slaughtered for two hours”. And she has no truck with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s soundtrack either, which means that scenes are “gooped up with sawing string music”. Here is another put-upon critic; when she references Thanksgiving towards the end, you know her mind is wandering towards the holiday season.
Finally then, to the Providence Journal, the Rhode Island newspaper serving McCarthy’s hometown. What would their critic make of their prodigal son’s latest lift to the screen? “The Road may be one of the bleakest movies ever made, certainly the bleakest of this century”, says one Michael Janusonis, a rare happy customer. “[It] is the flip side of something like Zombieland … but without the zombies”. Us neither.