THE ROAD ☆☆☆

A dismal, bleak and gloomy world destroyed and dejected is well created and captured for "The Road," a movie about a father and son, here nameless, traveling along derelict America in road to the coast, where is hoped salvation might exist. The filmmakers have created a post-apocalyptic terrain that truly withers your heart to see it, filled with overcast skies, graying plaines, and sweeps of whole cities set ablaze or just left vacant and neglected, blanketed by dense fog, or, for all we know, pollution. It's a truly horrific, or more appropriate, heartbreaking sight. Terrific production design, and wonderful photography by Javier Aguirresrobe, who gives all this destruction and despair the right dreary touch it needs. And praise to costume and make-up for giving Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Robert Duvall and others the ragged, soiled clothes, dirtied faces and flat, greasy hair. Production design, photography, costume, makes-up, it all helps to bring the dead world of "The Road" out. Should I mention Mortensen, Duvall, Theron, and new kid Smit-McPhee, and others, who all do good work here? Yes, and they do. Mortensen plays his character of the Father with a cracked, low voice, who speaks to only show his tiredness, irritation, and complete dread. It's one of his best roles, and he does it well, though he might be bypassed by the Oscars this year. Duvall plays his weary old man with the same air about him, who is just as hard to watch on screen because of how much hurt is in his scared, wizened face, and in his sad voice. Theron too, as the Mother in flashback showing her in a worse state, in early post-cataclysmic destruction, than her husband. And Smit-McPhee is great in complete contrast with Mortensen as the Son who carries the last remnants of innocence in humanity left.

Director John Hillcoat (of "The Proposition"), I felt, could have approached the movie with more intimacy, rather than being laid back. Though the script couldn't be any better written by Joe Penhall (Well, the way I look at it is I couldn't have done it any better).

"The Road," overall, is good in how it presents the scenarios of a world destroyed, and through it, plunged in utter turmoil, but could have been more intense, more intimate. Catch it for the vision, and Mortensen and gang, if anything else.