The Road

Okay, where the heck did we park the car?

Grade: B

Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, and Robert Duvall

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 51 minutes

Can an otherwise well-made film be so bleak that it ceases to be a good movie?

During the days – even weeks – it takes for the haunting, gripping film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to slowly seep into its audiences’ psyches, it becomes more than incidental to wonder whether misery might be a qualitative factor on which to judge a film’s merit, not merely a narrative device whose sole utility for prospective viewers is to help decide if a particular motion picture is their “kind of movie.”

The answer rests on whether such gloom and desolation are integral to story’s setting and spirit. In the case of McCarthy’s 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (published the year after his No Country For Old Men), how else to depict the collapse of civilization and the end of nearly all life on Earth? Apocalyptic pap like 2012 and I Am Legend sell more tickets because people prefer their despair and anguish packaged as neutered, stylized escapism rather than anything approaching grim reality. By contrast, to portray The Road’s fictional post-apocalyptic landscape, director John Hillcoat shot scenes atop Mount St. Helens in Washington, run-down parts of Pittsburgh, and New Orleans neighborhoods ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.

The crux of McCarthy’s text – and, in turn, Joe Penhall’s faithful screenplay – is not explaining or even showing the cataclysmic inferno that destroys nearly all the world’s plant and animal life. The closest director John Hillcoat comes are flashbacks to flickering reflections cast against the horrified faces of a Man (Viggo Mortensen, tremendous) and his Wife (Charlize Theron) (all the characters are nameless in the book and film).

Instead, the story focuses on the survival of the Man and his Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee), born post-apocalypse, an odyssey that embodies the dual meaning of the film’s title. Their arduous journey to the coast in search of food, shelter, safety, and possibly other survivors carries them along treacherous highways and byways teeming with bandits and gangs of cannibals – even a feeble Old Man (Robert Duvall) is a source of potential danger. Seemingly abandoned houses hold the promise of uneaten foodstuff…or ghoulish cellars stocked with emaciated humans being harvested limb by limb. The Man saves his two remaining bullets so he can quickly kill himself and his son rather than allowing them to be captured and suffer unspeakable horrors.

Moreover, their trek suggests mankind’s path to rebirth and redemption. The Wife begged to abort her child rather than bring him into such a hellish world. The Man’s drive to survive is not motivated by strict self-preservation, but rather both his paternal instinct and the notion that his Boy’s life and innocence represent our only hope for a better future.

Where Hillcoat falters is that by delving so deeply – however understandable – into the dark recesses of man’s nature, he buries that sense of hope under a mountain of cynicism. Hillcoat displays a keen command of craft, setting, and atmosphere, as he did in his previous film, the similarly austere The Proposition. But, both films wait until their closing scenes to offer any reason for enduring optimism (each by virtue of acts performed by characters played by Guy Pearce, ironically).

Yet, this is not a reason to totally discount the film’s audacious viewpoint, striking production value, and fine cast, particularly Mortensen and Smit-McPhee. Despair is the toll you must pay to travel The Road. Still, it’s a trip worth taking.

Neil Morris

Hancock

Hancock saves the world from rising gas prices

Grade: B –

Director: Peter Berg

Starring: Will Smith, Charlize Theron, and Jason Bateman

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 32 minutes

There is more than one reason why the July 4^th holiday is the apt time to drop Hancock into theaters. The first concert I ever attended without my parents (because, take from me, parents just don’t understand) was when DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince came to the Camp Lejeune Fieldhouse in Jacksonville, N.C. After nearly going bankrupt in the early 1990s, Will Smith was rescued from the obscurity that besets many rap stars – the opening act at my concert was MC Rob Base – by a starring role in the TV series The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Today, Smith is a world-famous, Oscar-nominated, Scientology-spouting, box-office behemoth, and after a series of mid-summer successes beginning, appropriately enough, with Independence Day, July 4^th has perennially morphed into “Big Willie Weekend.”

Smith’s summer movie tentpole this year is a boozy, reluctant super anti-hero named Hancock, short for the founding father moniker John Hancock. With immense strength, the ability to fly, and invulnerability, Hancock is the world’s lone superpower. But, decades of unchecked dominance and perceived ingratitude has fostered a surly indifference that Hancock tries to douse with bourbon and rank recalcitrance. The (bald?) eagle – his unofficial symbol – snitched into the front of his ski hat has become worn and tattered, and when Hancock tries apprehend a band of gun-toting evildoers, he causes $9 million of carnage in the process. Shock and awe, indeed.

It is an interesting American allegory, not only in regards to the current state of country’s geo-political standing but also the double-edged consequences of heroism and supremacy. However, apparently all Hancock needs is an extreme makeover and severe attitude adjustment. Enter a struggling PR consultant, Ray (Jason Bateman), who, together with his wife Mary (Charlize Theron), befriends Hancock after he saves Ray from a train wreck. Ray tackles Hancock’s arrested development by convincing him to surrender his demons and surrender to authorities, voluntarily serving time for some vaguely referenced outstanding warrant until the world realizes they need him and comes calling.

Hancock is a project that has languished in Hollywood development hell for over a decade. The net effect of too many cooks in the writers’ kitchen is a schizophrenic script that gradually jettisons the symbolism in its promising premise for a convoluted, shabby final act that at times more closely resembles a bad Highlander sequel (and, honestly, is there any other kind?). The focus shifts sharply from a light-hearted, yet biting satire to a maddening exploration into Hancock’s origins, his shadowy past relationship with Mary, and the introduction of a fleeting, flaccid ex-con/not-so-super-villain (Eddie Marsan). Simply put, the less Hancock begins to resemble us (i.e., flawed and world-weary), the less interested we become in him, even as, ironically, his immortality is compromised. We want Superman manning the wall, but we remain far more enamored with flawed demigods like Batman and Spiderman.

With his last two films, The Kingdom and the stupendous Friday Night Lights, director Peter Berg has carved out a distinctive directorial style. The fault with Hancock lies not with Berg – although the F/X effects are shockingly shoddy – or Smith, or even John Powell’s bombastic score, sampled as it is from the John Williams song book. If only the screenwriters had been as interested in saving this screenplay as they were segueing their protag into a world savior, Hancock might have registered as an effectively offbeat super-hero offering in the same vein as Superman II or M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable. Instead, Hancock eventually apes the very genre conventions it aims to parody. In other words, it becomes a standard-issue Will Smith 4^th of July vehicle - try to enjoy the ride.

Neil Morris