What The Road gains from its flashbacks, which find the wife reconciling herself to suicide, is an emphasis on the question of why to go on at all. (If the novel achieves transcendence, it does so through the sheer poetry of McCarthyвЂ™s exalted prose, which lights up the imagination with pure language that neednвЂ™t be weighed down by the dictates of the unseemly realistic visuals Hillcoat is charged with creating.) But unlike those filmmakers, Hillcoat has a difficult time evoking transcendence through sensuality, spirituality, or memories of natural splendor, as though the urge to forget what can never be regained spread from the protagonist to the filmmakers.

If the landscape owes something to TarkovskyвЂ™s Stalker, the pairing of this disembodied voice with images of paradise lost recall the films of Terrence Malick, especially The Thin Red Line. The flashbacks are accompanied by a voiceover so withered as to barely convey nostalgia.

Its sole glimmer of warmth emerges from its one significant extrapolation: several fleeting flashbacks to the manвЂ™s life immediately before and just after the unspecified catastrophe-a few moments stroking a horse in some rural idyll, the lovely face of his then pregnant, now dead wife. Their story comes down to this slow, aching migration south, in the face of starvation, dwindling supplies, and other people, most of them ruthless marauders, some of them utter ghouls.Дirected by John Hillcoat and scripted by Joe Penhall, this adaptation of Cormac McCarthyвЂ™s bestseller is strikingly faithful and thus unremittingly bleak. Shriveled, pale, hard-eyed, in tattered clothing, pushing that metal cart in some perverseВ parody of shopping, theyвЂ™re the post-apocalyptic Joad family, their number reduced to two, their promised land the vague prospect of less frigid weather along the Gulf Coast. Oregon, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania become acres of petrified trees, dead grass, ash.

The landscape itself in The Road seems mummified, so much of it drained and stiffened.

The roadmovie 2009