london film festival 2009 – the road
I can’t believe I’m going to admit this on a public website but here goes – Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer prize winning novel ‘The Road‘ is the first book I’ve read that made me cry. We’re talking actual, physical tears streaming down my face. I don’t recall ever having such a physical reaction to a book, not even reading legendary tear-jerkers such as ‘Charlotte’s Web’ or ‘Watership Down’ as a kid provoked such a reaction, since then I’ve been avidly devouring McCarthy’s other books and for me he’s the greatest writer I’ve discovered in the past ten or so years. Given the books critical kudos, its adoring fan base and cinematic breadth it was no surprise to learn that it had been optioned for a film treatment, when it was announced that Australian director John Hillcoat had been selected for the job I knew we would be in safe hands given the quality of his earlier work, the scathing outback western ‘The Propisition’ in particular demonstrating Hillcoat’s aptitude for the material. Oft-delayed and finally hitting cinema’s next month, a mere year after its initially planned release date ”The Road’ was one of the most anticipated films of the London Film Festival for me, can it possibly live up to the impeccable standards of its source material?
I’m becoming a little irritated with myself for constantly using the phrase ‘post-apocalyptic’ to describe a film but there really is no other phrase that best encapsulates this movie, maybe that’s more to do with the kind of films I go and see rather than any recent movement. ‘The Road’ takes place in a near future America that has been decimated by an unspecified cataclysmic event, some unholy conflagration of nuclear war and environmental holocaust that has caused society to retreat to a primitivism reminiscent of the dark ages where murder, rape and cannibalism run rampant throughout the dust shrouded world. In this realm a man and a boy (Viggo Mortensen and relative newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee) traverse the infernal, frigid landscape, hopelessly heading for the coast in the forlorn hope that 
shelter, safety and food will be more plentiful by the sea. The journey is interspersed with the man’s flashbacks detailing a pre and immediately post ‘event’ world with his initially pregnant wife (Charlize Theron) becoming increasingly more frantic and hopeless once the boy has been born, self-destructively hating herself for bringing life into such a poisoned, cruel world. The emphasis is on the man’s unyielding love for his son, a pale torch amidst the gloom, his remorseless drive to ensure his boy is protected and stays alive, remains untainted and somehow pure at all costs, even to the point of insisting on explaining the swiftest method of suicide should he face the prospect of capture by the terrifying cannibals that roam the desolate forests and cities.
It pains me to say this, it really does, but overall this film was a real disappointment for me. It’s not a bad film, in fact it’s a competent, faithful adaptation but being merely adequate does not do the novel justice. On the plus side it captures the tone of the novel, the desiccated, sterile, blasted landscapes are grimly portrayed from location shooting around a post Katrina New Orleans and various industrial and abandoned sites in Oregon and Pennsylvania. All the main beats of the book are intact, the horrifying basement larder, meeting the old man (portrayed by an almost unrecognisable Robert Duvall in the films best scene), the respite of rest in the shelter and the final conclusion all do the source material proud. Viggo is his usual adept, earthy, slightly sensitive persona and the expansion of his wife’s back story which gets a page at best in the novel is handled appropriately and effectively, it is telescoped enough to strengthen the tale for a cinematic translation. Any UK viewers of a certain age who remember the post attack phase of the seminal nuclear war drama ‘Threads‘ will recognise a very similar and chilling presentation of mankind in the midst of annihilation, choking out a few final pathetic gasps of life being expiring, alone, all the achievements of civilisation over the past thousands of years turned to dust.
The problems in ‘The Road‘ I can summate in one word – interference. There’s not been much in the press about this but putting two and two together – the financial woes of Miramax and their desperate need for commercial hits, that terrible action orientated trailer and the enormous gap between production wrap-up and final release all exude the stench of executive meddling. Scenes are truncated, seemingly cut short before they have a chance to breathe and disseminate what has occurred and their corollaries. Consequently there is no real sense of a journey, of time passing, in a puzzling fashion certain emotional beats of the film are front loaded and occur before your understanding of their significance has gained any traction. The boy isn’t bad per se but he seems far too well adjusted, too normal for someone who was born into this hellish world, who sees the dead and dying every day, whose only experience and education has been in suffering, terror and pain. This all culminates in a finale that should be emotionally shattering like the novel but hangs on the screen like a damp squib, the threads of the supposedly epic journey unfocused and the fathomless love between father and son unconvincing. Overall, a competent and passable movie in which a truly great and memorable film is trying to get out.
Unexpectedly director John Hillcoat got up as the credits dissolved away for a brief Q&A with festival director Sandra Hebron which provided some background to the productions gruelling shoot, he explained the terror he experienced when flying the print down to New Mexico to show it to McCarthy and gauge his opinion, a terror exasperated when as the credits rolled McCarthy wordlessly got up and walked out, disappearing for some twenty minutes – turns out he loved and it just had to rush to the bathroom. Most interesting was the revelation that the Production Designer, fellow Australian Chris Kennedy scouted most of the film’s locations over two months just by using Google Earth, despatching scouts with digital cameras for closer inspections when really interesting looking places were identified. After Gasper Noe’s similarly unexpected appearance at the ‘Enter The Void’ screening I’m doing quite well on the director spotting front, that’s two out of three so far with my review of ‘Cold Souls’ coming up soon…
Films To See In 2009
It’s a tight run race for most anticipated movie for the Mint in 2009 with some major league big hitters returning to the screen from all strata of US film and a couple of foreign numbers that sound terrific. So on with the show;
‘Tree Of Life‘ – Terence Malick is back and it quite simply doesn’t get much better than that. He’s moving at lightning speed these days, spending a mere four years between films as well as producing a couple of other projects in the hiatus. Plot details are sketchy (that was from last April) on this but it seems to center on the coming of age of a group of friends in 1950’s America. The cast is heavyweight with the likes of Brad Pitt and Sean Penn in the main roles, filming wrapped in August last year so no doubt Malick has spent the intervening period putting his meticulous touches to another visual poem. Like ‘The New World‘ this story has been floating around in Malicks cerebellum since the 1970’s so this will certainly be an opening night visit, to whet your appetite I’ve read that the intention of the film is nothing less than a metaphysical examination of the purpose of time. So, nothing too ambitious then….
‘Avatar‘ – The more I hear about this the more excited I get. James Cameron is back after a ten year hiatus with what sounds like the most ambitious SF project since ‘2001’. Plot details are scant but it sounds like it’s the tale of one man who gets pulled into an intergalactic war with an alien race who are able to possess humans. That’s not exactly inspiring (and probably deliberately murky) but when you delve into the approach that Cameron is taking in terms of incorporating photo-realistic CGI, 3D motion capture, miniature design and every other tool at the forefront of visual design then I for one am getting hugely excited. I’m going to go out on a limb here and claim that Cameron is aiming for nothing less than taking cinema forward into the 21st century by realising the full potential of the new technologies available to platinum standard, astronomical budget wielding directors and exactly how these technologies can be fused to transform the art form – think the ‘The Jazz Singer‘ and the introduction of sound, ‘The Robe‘ with the first introduction of the wide-screen format or the aforementioned ‘2001‘ and the use of mattes, process shots and miniatures which still pass muster today, 40 years on. Of course what is essential is that the story and characters are not dwarfed by the technology on show which is something Cameron is quite rightly acutely aware of, it will be good to see him back with Ripley as well. He’s actually hired Harvard and Oxford sociologists, linguists, ethnologists and the like in an effort to research and construct a believable alien species culture – that’s a positively Kubrickian level of pre-production. A long wait alas as it’s not due until December, here is the first teaser video. EDIT – OK so the teaser says Summer 2009, looks like they may have brought it forward. I ain’t complaining…
‘Public Enemies‘ – Michael Mann is back and seems to have taken a new direction, climbed into a time machine and taken his unique approach to the crime milieu back to the 1920’s with a thoroughly amazing cast. Details are sketchy, there’s no trailer or other promotional material to speak of as yet but I’m sure it will be another great crime film with a stunning evocation of the jazz age, a trademark examination of the blurring of lines between the criminal and legal, some terrific production design with nods to the rich vein of American gangster movie history coupled with some cunning film noir visual motifs. Here is a great article on Mann and the influence of the genius that is Edward Hopper on his work. I expect more of the same given the ‘Public Enemies’ time period.
‘The Road‘ – Cormac McCarthy’s dystopian masterpiece gets the big screen treatment with this adaptation of his post 9/11, post Katrina global-warming Armageddon fable. I can’t think of a better marriage of subject matter and director, if anyone can get those bane blasted landscapes visualised, if anyone can master the chilling nature of humanity reverting back to a medieval era of utter brutality with that tangible sense of absolute despair that permeates the novel up on then it’s John Hillcoat, the brilliant director behind ‘The Proposition‘ and cult ‘Ghosts Of The Civil Dead‘ which is a tough, tough movie. Viggo Mortensen is perfectly cast as ‘The Man’ with newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee as ‘The Son’, it should be interesting to see how they tackle some of the religious subtleties of the novel. ‘The Road‘ is one of the most brutal yet moving books I’ve ever read, I really hope they do it justice.
‘Let The Right One In‘ – has been getting universally amazing reviews and is hotly debated on many of the podcasts I frequent, it’s very irritating when like me you do everything humanly possible to avoid spoilers of even the smallest kind. Also annoyingly the damn thing isn’t out until April February in the UK and I refuse to torrent it as I’m pulling the purist card on this one, if it’s half as good as the reviews make out (it even got on the Sight & Sound best film list for 2008, quite a rarity for a ‘genre’ picture) then it’s a must see cinema jaunt. It also looks very much like a ‘winter’ film so I’m mystified why it isn’t getting an earlier release given so I’m quite glad the release has been moved forward in order to exploit the critical kudos that would have dissipated over the next few months. The brilliant Kim Newman said this film has the most ‘heartwarming massacre of children ever seen in a movie’ and that’s good enough for me.
‘Tokyo Gore Police‘ – Is there anything more refreshing than some total, utter Japanese lunacy that makes you want to have your eyes exorcised following a screening? This was premiered in 2008 at the London Frightfest festival but they had already sold out by the time I got round to booking tickets such was the anticipation of UK genre fans. It’s the first picture that Japanese special effects guru Yoshihiro Nishimura has directed and I’ll think you’ll agree from the trailer (massively, utterly NSFW) that he has decided to really, really go for it. Sometimes I think you just need to throw away any sense of normality, of sense, of decency and submit yourself to the whims of a throughly deranged vision – this looks like absolutely mental nonsense, if that makes me sick then so be it. Hmm, it makes me wonder what happened to that Miike film I was looking forward to this time last year but screw it, I’m sure ‘TGP‘ will satisfy my regular fix of oriental phantasmagoric excess.
‘Watchmen‘ – Well, maybe we’ll get this in 2009 and maybe we won’t. Whilst the trailer(s) are technically impressive and I suppose you have to admire Snyder’s faithful re-production of the graphic novel panels I suspect this will suffer the same fate as ‘300’ and be a lifeless, soulless adaptation of a hugely admired comic book series. Let me be clear, I’m not being precious about the graphic novel – I love it, it was instrumental in my appreciation of the form that I used to follow diligently but even if you resurrected Kubrick, throw £200 million at the project and shot issue nine on Mars then it still wouldn’t be the same thing as the original book. It couldn’t possibly. It’s a different form of communication, a story that by definition can’t be told in a two, three hour movie but that is always the case with these dense literary templates – I’m fairly sure that some scenes from ‘Gone With The Wind’ or ‘Dr Zhivago’ were dropped despite their immense running time and the challenge to fidelity of the source material. But just to contradict all that I still can’t escape being secretly excited about this as like ‘300‘ at the very least we’ll get some cool imagery and fighting. I for one will be lowering my expectations accordingly in the hope I’ll be pleasantly surprised and ignore the fact that they’ve already changed the ending. Here’s my Ozymandias moment of 2008.
‘The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button‘ – David Fincher. I could of course deny my excitement and perhaps unrealistic expectations of every new project of his but this gets an instant Minty circle in the calendar based on pedigree alone. Based on a short story by F.Scott Fitzgerald the film is the tale of a man born at the age of eighty who matures in reverse, reverting back to middle-age and onward which is a premise that is rich in pathos and perhaps a perfect foil to the post Christmas, January blues. What I’m also look forward to with this is a two and a half hour epic tale that will hopefully weave in a unique take on cinema storytelling with some subtle special effects that have caused quite a stir over in the States for their ingenious afflections, I’m in the mood for something uplifting, reflective and worthy of immersion. I’m somewhat wary that it’s something of a ‘Forrest Gump’ type movie with early reviews citing Button as being something of an observer rather than protagonist in the tale but we shall see. C’mon, it’s Fincher so it’s always worth looking forward to…
One honorable mention to add to those listed in my previous post is ”Los-Cronocrímenes‘ which continues the recent tradition of interesting films emerging from Spain, the other good news is yet another Kubrick retrospective in London over February and March, this time at the BFI which even I think is a bit premature after last years Barbican season. Nevertheless this has got me all a flutter as has the ‘Kubrick Study Day‘ event that I’ve just confirmed tickets for which from the write-up sounds like six hours of bliss. Roll on 2009….
Minty's Menagerie 
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