Viggo Mortensen: "Road" Warrior (Los Angeles Times)

By Sam Adams

November 18, 2009

John Hillcoat needed a face. To carry the lead in "The Road," his adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son roaming the charred remains of what was once America, would require an actor capable of sustaining an intimate two-hander in which the bulk of his scenes would be played opposite a young boy. The lead actor would also need the drawing power to support the movie's $25-million budget. But it was the face that concerned him most.

"I was really looking for the everyman from the book," Hillcoat recalled before the movie's premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. "There was this thing of trying to find someone that you could really buy as being totally credible in going as far as he did through that kind of journey. There was this incredible emotional range that would be needed, but it was really that everyman thing that kept sticking in my head. I was actually looking at photographs by Dorothea Lange, because the book reminds me of Steinbeck's 'The Grapes of Wrath.' The face of Viggo really fits into that world."

With American and Dutch parentage, raised in Argentina, Copenhagen and upstate New York, and talents that include poetry, painting, photography and music -- not to mention his former marriage to punk singer Exene Cervenka -- Viggo Mortensen is hardly an everyman. But his face has the creased experience of Lange's Depression-era subjects, an etched, weather-beaten look that has all but vanished from the screen. (It doesn't hurt that he is simultaneously easy on the eyes.)

For Mortensen, at least, acting is hard work. His intensive, even obsessive, preparation is the stuff of legend: a trip to Ukraine to scout gang tattoos for "Eastern Promises," or the time he had a tooth knocked out during a "Lord of the Rings" sword fight and offered to Super Glue it back in. But how do you prepare for the end of the world?

"You don't," Mortensen said, slouched down in a hotel easy chair, his intensity undiminished by his relaxed posture. "You just have to do it. There's a leap of faith involved. You can prepare and rehearse, which we did. But then you have to just go for it, and it doesn't matter who makes the first move, as soon as that person does, the other person has to jump right in there and have your back."

That's not quite the whole story. While he was on a tour doing publicity for another movie, Mortensen would sneak off and talk to homeless people, whose survival-oriented existence paralleled that of his character. "Every major city around the world, there are people that live outside, and they have the same concerns as our characters," he said. "How am I going to get food? How am I going to stay dry? How am I going to keep people from stealing my stuff or hurting me? You can't get any more basic than that."

In the stark terrain of "The Road," there is only one human relationship that remains intact: the one between Mortensen's character and his son, played by then-11-year-old Australian Kodi Smit-McPhee. (In the movie as in the novel, the characters are unnamed.) Although fleeting encounters bring them into contact with an old man ( Robert Duvall) and a cannibal thug (Garret Dillahunt), and flashbacks bring the mother ( Charlize Theron) into the picture, for most of the movie, Mortensen and Smit-McPhee are the only figures on screen.

"As an acting exercise, if you look at it from a technical standpoint, you've got nothing really to rely on except the other actor most of the time," Mortensen said. "There aren't a lot of props. It's just us and this devastated landscape."

Mortensen and Hillcoat knew that the success of the film would be largely dependent on finding the right actor to fill the demanding role of the boy, and Mortensen lavishes praise on his juvenile costar. "I've never had a better acting partner, someone I knew had my back, and he knew I had his," Mortensen said. "His ethics as a performer and as a worker, as a craftsman, really, are much more grounded in decency and professionalism than many adult performers I've worked with."

The bond between costars was cemented early in the shoot, during a scene in which Mortensen washes the brains of a recently dispatched adversary out of his son's hair. Having sought out inhospitable climes, including post-Katrina New Orleans, to stand in for the story's barren wastes, the production was filmed in frigid western Pennsylvania, where the river water was so intensely cold that Smit-McPhee began to cry for real.

"That was a milestone, unexpected," Mortensen said. "It was a tough scene anyway, but it became much richer emotionally than we expected it to. It's roughly what the scene needed to be, but it's much more intense because he really was in pain and he was freezing cold, and I was ready at any second to go, 'OK, let's get him away. Let's get him warmed up.' But he was looking at me in a way that he was telling me with his eyes, even though he was really suffering, that he wanted to continue. He stayed in character, but it was very real what he was feeling, and it was very real what I was feeling in response. The foundation of any good acting is good reaction, and he gave that to me. And I gave it to him. When he saw that I realized this was real right now, we went to another level and we never looked back, really."

"When we looked at each other, it was like that father and that son, and me and him connected on another level," Smit-McPhee recalled. "We knew each other a bit more."

"It was an intensely moving moment," Hillcoat said. "After calling cut, they kept their embrace, and to the credit of Andy McPhee, who is Kodi's father, he did the most extraordinary thing. He was going to go in and take his son. Even though Viggo was holding Kodi, [Viggo] was looking to his father, ready to hand him over, but Andy stepped back. He said it was an agonizing decision for him afterward, but he knew that it was also critical to the bonding between them. I think that changed the dynamic. Really, it deepened it, from that day on."

It's fitting that a moment of adversity would knit the actors closer together, because "The Road" deals with the way difficult circumstances either strengthen the bonds between people or destroy them. Mortensen, who studied films by the austere Russian directors Andrei Tarkovsky and Alexander Sokurov to prepare, said the extremity of apocalyptic scenarios throws the moral issues into stark relief. "They're tests," he said. "How do you behave when everything's gone to hell? When you have nothing except each other, and each others' beating hearts, you're tested. You don't always get along when you're around someone all the time, period. And in these circumstances of fear and hunger and paranoia, it's even more of a test of character. Not just courage but of basic human decency. When everything's taken away, what's left? Are you going to be a good guy or not?"

Toronto Film Festival 2009 - Día 3

Como expliqué ayer, más material sobre lo que me pareció "Up in the Air" pueden encontrar acá.

Ahora, a las cuatro películas del sábado.

THE INFORMANT!, de Steven Soderbergh (6) No me queda muy en claro cuál es el propósito o el universo en el que se mueve, últimamente, Steven Soderbergh. No soy de los que lo odian a muerte ni tampoco creo que sea un gran director. Me gusta "Che" y hace poco vi con bastante interés "The Girlfriend Experience", otra de esas películas pequeñas y personales que hace cada tanto. "The Informant!" es una de sus películas más o menos grandes, con Matt Damon encarnando a un bioquímico que decide denunciar a la compañía en la que trabaja como ejecutivo por arreglar precios con sus competidores. Lo que no dice es que él también está metido en bastantes otras cosas y que su personalidad es, por decirlo sutilmente, bastante complicada. Virada hacia la comedia absurda (de a poco nos vamos enterando que el hombre es un mentiroso patológico, un fabulador, un paranoico o tal vez un bipolar, o todo junto), con un Damon regordete y entusiasta en el papel principal, la película tiene un aire a esas comedias de espías de los '60 mezclada con el thriller de espionaje a la manera de "The Insider". De a ratos funciona, de a ratos no; por momentos parece cobrar vuelo, en otros en completamente chata; a veces es graciosa, en otros es bastante tonta. Una película casi tan enrarecida como el personaje que describe.

CRACKS, de Jordan Scott (3) Antes de que pregunten porqué vi esta película, les recuerdo que formo parte de un jurado y que, por algún motivo, esta película está incluida entre lo que tenemos que ver. Es la primera que veo "de la lista" y si seguimos así, esto puede ser lamentable. Una peli de colegio de chicas en Irlanda en los años '30, con una profesora sexy (Eva Green), que se enamora de una alumna exótica y española, ambas con un pasado secreto. "Chick-lit-sexy-shit", o como quieran llamarlo al género.

THE ROAD, de John Hillcoat (7) La novela es apasionante, pero yo pensaba que era infilmable. Su gran mérito está en la escritura de Cormac McCarthy, cómo describe ese ambiente post-apocalíptico que recorren un padre y su hijo. Pero la novela casi no cuenta una historia: ellos caminan, tienen cuatro o cinco situaciones a lo largo del libro y luego, bueno, termina. ¿Cómo se filma el fin del mundo, el fin de todo? Hillcoat accedió a agregarle algunas cosas a la "trama" (unos flashbacks, algunas situaciones extendidas, diálogos que no están en la película), pero le mantuvo el tono oscuro y amargo, la dureza de las imágenes y la soledad desesperante de esa caminata a través de un mundo que ya no existe. Es una película que agobia y puede llegar a ser desesperante --también lo era el libro-- y si bien no se puede comparar el trazo literario con el audiovisual (no porque uno sea mejor que el otro, sino porque son diferentes lenguajes), hay que reconocer que Hillcoat creó algo propio: un western del fin de los tiempos que tiene momentos realmente asombrosos y tremendos.

FACE/VISAGE, de Tsai Ming-liang (6) Tal vez en unos días ese 6 se transforme en 3 o en 9, no lo se. Vi la película hace unas horas y, mientras la veía, pasaba de la alegría al fastidio, de la fascinación a la irritación. No hay, casi, una trama que una a las viñetas creadas por Tsai en París, con Lee Kang-sheng y varias leyendas francesas de la Nouvelle Vague (Ardant, Leaud, Moreau y también Amalric y Baye, además de Laetitia Casta, claro) haciendo sus pequeños "numeritos" al mejor estilo del taiwanés. ¿Cómo resumirlo? Si el filme se divide en, digamos, unas 40 "situaciones", uno podría decir que hay diez brillantes, otras diez aceptables, otras diez ya vistas y predecibles y otras diez insoportables. Si pienso en las brillantes (la de la indundación --sí, otra más--, el plano del hotel y la autopista, la de Amalric y Kang, la de Casta y las dos bailarinas desnudas) es genial, si pienso en las impresentables (casi todo lo de Leaud bordea lo patético y lo de Casta con la cinta adhesiva es aún más irritante), me vuelve el fastidio. Dejémoslo en un empate técnico.

"The Road", de John Hillcoat (Tres clips)

"The Road", de John Hillcoat (Variety Review) - En Venecia y Toronto

Links a otras críticas, en The Auteurs Daily (aquí)

A Dimension Films release presented with 2929 Prods. of a Nick Wechsler and Chockstone Pictures production. Produced by Wechsler, Paula Mae Schwartz, Steve Schwartz. Executive producers, Todd Wagner, Mark Cuban, Marc Butan, Rudd Simmons. Directed by John Hillcoat. Screenplay, Joe Penhall, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy.

The Man - Viggo Mortensen
The Boy - Kodi Smit-McPhee
Wife - Charlize Theron
Old Man - Robert Duvall
The Veteran - Guy Pearce
Veteran's Wife - Molly Parker
The Thief - Michael K. Williams
The Gang Member - Garret Dillahunt

By TODD MCCARTHY

This "Road" leads nowhere. If you're going to adapt a book like Cormac McCarthy's 2006 bestseller, you're pretty much obliged to make a terrific film or it's not worth doing -- first because expectations are high, and second, because the picture needs to make it worth people's while to sit through something so grim. Except for the physical aspects of this bleak odyssey by a father and son through a post-apocalyptic landscape, this long-delayed production falls dispiritingly short on every front. Showing clear signs of being test-screened and futzed with to death, the Dimension release may receive a measure of respect in some quarters but is very, very far from the film it should have been, spelling moderate to tepid B.O. prospects after big fest preems.

Even more than "No Country for Old Men," with which the Coen brothers showed what is possible artistically and commercially with a McCarthy novel onscreen, "The Road" reads extremely cinematically. Filled almost entirely by spare but vivid physical descriptions of a decimated United States in its death throes after an unexplained catastrophe, and with limited dialogue, the book serves up images and tense situations that practically leap from the page as potential movie scenes.

Some things were obvious: The film's style needed to be as terse, exacting, stripped-down, tough and precise as McCarthy's prose style. The picture also should have been shocking, haunting and, at the end, deeply moving. As it is, director John Hillcoat ("The Proposition") and lenser Javier Aguirresarobe have come up with some arresting scorched-earth vistas captured on locations in Louisiana, Pennsylvania and Oregon, but have missed the bigger picture almost entirely.

It's a survival story in the most elemental possible way, as an unnamed man and boy, about 11, trudge daily through a dark world of barren forests with falling trees, torched towns and vandalized stores, empty roads and depleted fields, in search of food and shelter, all the while taking care to avoid roving gangs searching for defenseless humans to be turned into slaves or, more likely, dinner.

The man (Viggo Mortensen) has a revolver with two bullets in it, then only one. As far too many flashbacks of his pre-catastrophe life reveal, he's not a military or survivalist type, and he had a gorgeous wife (Charlize Theron) until she couldn't stand it anymore and took off. But his love for his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) has made him resourceful and resolute despite the utter lack of long-term prospects, and he continually responds to the youngster's despairing questions with answers that insist upon perseverance.

For reasons that remain unclear even after they arrive there, they are walking toward the sea, and dreadful sights abound along the way: skeletons, rotting bodies, naked prisoners locked in dark basements like animals to be butchered (the book's two most ghastly images have been dispensed with, however). Occasionally, they chance upon an abandoned house with a stock of canned food (Coca-Cola has no problem surviving the apocalypse), clean blankets and clothes.

The drama is one little genre step away from being an outright zombie movie, something that's much more evident onscreen, with its drooling, crusty-toothed aggressors and live humans with missing limbs; memories of "Night of the Living Dead" unavoidably advance in all the scenes in which the man and boy take refuge in a house, where they must contend with unfriendly marauders.

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.

Dialogue that should have been directed with an almost Pinteresque sense of timing is delivered without meaningful shadings, principally by two actors who have no chemistry together. Unfortunately, Mortensen lacks the gravitas to carry the picture; suddenly resembling Gabby Hayes with his whiskers and wayward hair, the actor has no bottom to him, and his interactions with Smit-McPhee, whom one can believe as Theron's son but not Mortensen's, never come alive. Tellingly, both thesps are better in their individual scenes with other actors; Mortensen gets into it with Robert Duvall, who plays an old coot met along the road, while Smit-McPhee registers a degree of rapport with Guy Pearce, practically unrecognizable at first as another wanderer. Generally, the boy's readings are blandly on the nose.

Scraps of narration by Mortensen seem like unnecessary afterthoughts, while the preponderance of scenes featuring the wife is explainable only because Theron's presence needed to be justified by more screen time. Score by longtime Hillcoat collaborator Nick Cave and Warren Ellis borders on the treacly, softening the tone and further conventionalizing a film that should have gone the other direction toward something harsh and daring.

Camera (Technicolor, widescreen), Javier Aguirresarobe; editor, Jon Gregory; music, Nick Cave, Warren Ellis; production designer, Chris Kennedy; art director, Gershon Ginsburg; set decorator, Robert Greenfield; costume designer, Margot Wilson; sound (Dolby Digital/SDDS/DTS), Edward Tise; sound designer, Leslie Shatz; supervising sound editor, Robert Jackson; re-recording mixers, Todd Beckett, Chris David; assistant director, John Nelson; additional editor, Craig Wood; casting, Francine Maisler. Reviewed at Sunset screening room, West Hollywood, Aug. 27, 2009. (In Venice Film Festival -- competing; Telluride Film Festival; Toronto Film Festival -- Special Presentations.) MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 110 MIN.

"The Road", de John Hillcoat (trailer)