Telluride 2009 Review: John Hillcoat's The Road

Beautifully bleak. That's the best way to describe John Hillcoat's The Road, which I saw yesterday evening in Telluride. Although it's a rather depressing story overall, it's told with such an incredible amount of vigor and passion, that it's actually possible to enjoy. Especially because director John Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall made sure to keep the integrity of Cormac McCarthy's novel intact and stay as true to his words as possible. It seems like a near impossible book to adapt, but they did the absolute best job they could. For as bleak as it was, I was never bored, and it was never bland at all, which is quite an accomplishment.

Set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where every tree is burnt out or dead, nothing but greyness remains, and the sun never shines, The Road is about a father (Viggo Mortensen) and his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee). It's a story about ...