50 Days 50 Films - #49 "The Road" (John Hillcoat)

I discovered Australian filmmaker John Hillcoat through his many music video collaborations with Nick Cave. The one that really leaped out at me was "Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow" off The Bad Seeds' "No More Shall We Part" album. In substance it's really just a bunch of Russians dancing around a basement somewhere, but Hillcoat infuses the whole thing with a quiet, sickly menace and then liberally slathers a sticky coating of Eurotrash sleaze all over top of it. You can smell that basement, and what you're smelling ain't good. If there has ever been a more perfect match of music and visuals, I don't know what it would be.

Cave wrote the screenplay and performed the soundtrack (with Warren Ellis) to Hillcoat's gritty-as-fuck Australian western "The Proposition" in 2005. In "The Road," Hillcoat's 2009 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Cave is present only on the soundtrack (the script was written by Joe Penhall). So this is the movie where I was finally able to take off my Bad Seeds fanboy glasses and truly see Hillcoat for the master filmmaker he is.

I really could have picked either "The Proposition" or "The Road" for this entry. I love them both, and certainly they are similarly harrowing experiences. But, to me, "The Road" is the more impressive feat, due in no small part to the quiet but gutwrenching performances by Viggo Mortensen and young Kodi-Smit McPhee as an unnamed father and son making their way across a blasted post-Apocalyptic landscape. Mortensen anchors this movie in a way that Guy Pearce isn't quite able to in "The Proposition," and McPhee gives the best and most nuanced performance by a child actor I can remember seeing in years.

I was also impressed by how deftly Hillcoat manages to work with what, on the page, seemed to me to be pretty unruly source material. The Coens hit paydirt with "No Country For Old Men" just two years earlier, but beyond that the list of successful McCarthy adaptations is pretty thin ("All The Pretty Horses," anyone?). But here we have the perfect mesh of sensibilities. McCarthy and Hillcoat drop us headfirst into a dying world and strip out all traces of the Apocalypse-chic that has wormed its way into pop culture over the last decade. "The Road" is harrowing without being alienating, grueling without being boring or monotonous. The tender moments are quiet but heartfelt. The violence, when it comes, is quick and brutal.

And at the center of it all is the simple love of a father for his son. If you're not torn to shreds by the last 15 minutes of the movie, I don't want to know you because you, sir or ma'am, have no soul.

Hillcoat and Cave teamed up again for "Lawless" in 2012. The film is pretty good, definitely has its moments, but doesn't really rise to the expectations Hillcoat set with his previous two films. But I have faith. He'll be back, and I'll be first in line.