Venice Film Festival: The Road
John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road finally premiered at The Venice Film Festival after its release date was pushed back several times. It’s set to come out on the 8th of January 2010.
Geoffrey McNabb in The Independent
“John Hillcoat has made a film of power and sensitivity that works remarkably well on the big screen. It plays like a Dystopian version of Huck Finn. “Tattered gods slouching in their rags across the waste,” was how McCarthy described the father and son on their grim odyssey south across America toward the coast.”
Roderick Conway Morris in The New York Times
This is a menacing, bleak, suspenseful drama shot with an almost monochrome, austere beauty, with impressive performances from both Mr. Mortensen and Smit-McPhee, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Ms. Theron. She is still a poignant presence in the unfolding journey, appearing in flashback sequences.
“Hillcoat’s vision is forthright and brutal. There are, however, a couple of suspect decisions that suggest a loss of bottle somewhere along the line and that diminish the final film.”
4 stars out of 5
But Hillcoat, who played with heavy violence in “The Proposition” and made some of it stick, shows no talent for or inclination toward setting up a scene here; any number of sequences in “The Road” could have been very suspenseful if built up properly, but Hillcoat, working from a script by Joe Penhall, just hopscotches from scene to scene in almost random fashion without any sense of pacing or dramatic modulation.
