The Road by Cormac McCarthy is about a father, never named, who is heading south with his son (The Boy) in a post-apocalyptic world where our biosphere has died, no animals or wildlife survive and the few humans still on the planet battle starvation and packs of roving cannibals. With the exception of a brief encounter with a squid, the book is a long, eloquently-written fable about every father in the world trying to raise his son through these times of doubt and uncertainty. The Man is constantly thinking of using one of his last bullets on The Boy, should he have to, much like each father could potentially abandon his son to the real world while their ward is under-prepared.

If the book was a moving experience that compared raising a child to the apocalypse, the movie concerned itself with showing us what raising a child in the apocalypse would look like. Because the novel this film was based on is so entrenched in using text as a means to deliver the story and theme, the movie feels like a parallel experience, where, by observing these characters, director John Hillcoat spends an hour establishing things the book had down in fifty pages. Interestingly, what we, the audience, have gotten out of this are two distinct experiences dealing with the same subject matter. The book is better, but the movie isn’t just reiterating the purpose of the book.

Make any sense?

The Road, the film, is made up of bleak landscapes and a score by Nick Cave that alternates between making itself known and hiding in the background when it should be taking the thematic reins. The visual aspect of The Road, the stark reality of seeing skinny naked-Viggo-Mortenson-butt, is its greatest strength. Power lines pepper the horizon like crucifixes, steam liners burn while beached on highways, abandoned suburbs…well, damn, they’re always creepy.

Viggo Mortenson does a great job, as always, as The Man, even though his main objective in the film is just to stay alive and keep The Boy safe. There isn’t a great deal on screen for Mortenson to work with. His Man is harsh, but is also well aware that his child was born after the unseen apocalypse and thus doesn’t know about things like manners, smoking or alcohol. Hillcoat and Mortenson have a secret pact throughout the film, and that pact is that, up until The Boy argues back for the first time towards the climax, The Road is from the perspective of The Man. When we see flashbacks of The Woman (Charlize Theron is a strong but brief performance), we always hear the conversation, we see what The Man sees. We only get one scene of “romance” between The Man and the long-dead Woman, and that’s in a single-shot-flashback that only concerns itself with healthy-looking hands learning to play the piano.

The Boy, played by Australian actor Kodi Smit-McPhee, matches Mortenson beat-for-beat in an impressive performance by a child actor. Considering The Boy in the book was frequently the physical cipher for emotional and philosophical discussion, Smit-McPhee manages to bring his wide-eyed reactions shots to new levels of emotion, as long as you remind yourself at the beginning of the film that this kid has never seen anything you and I would describe as “the normal world.” In one scene, when Mortenson’s Man is dangerously close to offing his Boy rather than turn him over to cannibal-rapists, The Boy responds to the cocking of the pistol’s hammer with “When will I see you again?” and the tension of the moment gives way to the realization that death means nothing to a child being raised amongst the walking inhabitants of hell.

Appearances by other characters are sparse, but – like all fables – there are a few along The Road to provide context and dialogue. Robert Duvall’s Old Man serves the same purpose as every blind, old man in fables throughout history and The Wire’s Michael K. Williams shows up as The Thief, the character that provides the tipping point for the divide between The Man and The Boy.

All and all, The Road will provide you with a bleak experience you won’t necessarily mind having as long as you follow your screening with a solid meal and a good night’s sleep under a blanket. The sad thing is that the book never left my mind for a good week after I finished it, and even friends who have not read the book seem to be okay with the movie the next day. The book is one experience and the movie is another, but instead of offering high praise, like “each is the other’s equal,” I can’t help but think that I’ll face the apocalypse of fatherhood but the desolate landscape of The Road is as distant to me as most science fiction.

Ok, Weinstein Company. It took you long enough to notice that you were crowding Thanksgiving releases with your award-hopefuls. Viggo Mortensen by-the-way of John Hillcoat has The Road, another Cormac McCarthy adaptation drama, this time with cannibalism, opens for Thanksgiving and has also been delayed almost a year to hit its award stride.

The newest victim of jockeying for awards positions is The Weinstein Company’s movie musical based on a Broadway musical based on a play based on a Fellini film, Nine. Nine stars Daniel Day Lewis, Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard and Nicole Kidman which should already have Academy members salivating. It’s the newest directorial effort from Rob Marshall, who won Oscar gold in 2003 with Chicago and will be bringing us the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film our way in the future.

Nine has been pushed from its November 25th opening, which would put it in competition with The Road, to a December 18th release date in New York and LA, expanding wide on Christmas Day.

Because who doesn’t want a musical on Christmas? Eh? Eh?

This year has been full of choppy waters for The Weinstein Company, who barely kept their heads above water with Inglorious Basterds doing the lionshare of the profit-raising this year. Now all they need is more awards presence and they might live on to make…I dunno, Halloween 3?

A great first trailer for The Road has appeared online. The Road is a post-apocalyptic tale of a journey taken by a father and his young son across a barren landscape that was blasted by an unnamed cataclysm that destroyed civilization and most life on earth. The cast includes Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Guy Pearce.

The Road will be released in October in the US.

USA Today got our first look at The Road, which stars Viggo Mortensen, Robert Duvall, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce and Kodi Smit McPhee (who would have played a young Wolverine in X-Men Origins: Wolverine if filming didn’t get pushed back)

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food–and each other.