The Road
Director: John Hillcoat
Exam
Director: Stuart Hazeldine
Spread
Director: David Mackenzie
The Road is a $20 million-budgeted, post-apocalyptic journey through a world decimated by an unspecified disaster (nuclear war would appear to be the favourite). It’s based on Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of 2006. Praise for the novel also came from climate change activist George Monbiot, who said it “could be the most important environmental book ever”.
Bringing such a seminal text to the screen must have been a dauntingly onerous task and was – perhaps surprisingly – entrusted to British dramatist Joe Penhall, despite his sole previous big-screen credits being Some Voices (2000) and Enduring Love (2004), both of which enjoyed mixed receptions.
Penhall has adhered pretty closely to McCarthy’s pared-down text, in which “The Man” (Viggo Mortensen) and his son – named in the end credits only as “The Boy” (Kodi Smit-McPhee) – trek through a steel-grey wasteland devoid of animal or plant life, avoiding the bands of marauding savages and cannibals who seem to be the sole remaining members of the population. The Man more than once considers a mercy killing of his son to spare him from a far more horrific demise.
The Road is directed by Australia’s John Hillcoat – best known for The Proposition (2005). And the union of a dour, grim director with a dour, grim novelist produces a two-hour movie which is, predictably, not exactly an upbeat mirth-filled extravaganza.
The performances are strong. Mortensen has always relished such “filthy fingernail” roles requiring physical hardship, while Robert Duvall contributes a touching, rheumy-eyed cameo as “Old Man”. The cinematography by Spanish veteran Javier Aguirresarobe finds infinite shades between gunmetal grey and dunnish brown, while the production design presents wrecked and nameless cities and blasted, unidentified countryside with chilling verisimilitude.
But we’re nevertheless frequently distracted by nagging plot-holes, by the arch, admonishing tone of this self-conscious fable and by the sense that Hillcoat and Penhall are somewhat leadenly retracing dystopic terrain previously covered with rather more grace and intelligence by Michael Haneke in 2002’s strangely overlooked Time of the Wolf.
And whereas Haneke, working within the rather more forgiving world of the European art movie, characteristically stuck to the bleakness of his vision from start to finish, The Road – scored in surprisingly conventionally mainstream style by Nick Cave (working
with Warren Ellis) – is ultimately a rather Hollywood-ish Götterdämmerung, albeit rather more pretentiously po-faced than the unashamedly trashy charms of Roland Emmerich’s unfairly despised 2012.
Like McCarthy’s novel, the movie features an incongruous coda which casts all that’s come before in an unexpectedly ironic
light and strains credulity a little too hard
to wring optimism from a situation of terminal, bereaved despair.
The Apprentice gets a darkly witty, vaguely futuristic re-imagining via Exam, writer-director Stuart Hazeldine’s claustrophobic debut feature. The 38-year-old has carved himself something of a niche as rewrite man for Hollywood science fiction extravaganzas in the past few years. Reportedly, he has mega-budget versions of Paradise Lost and The Tripods currently occupying his in-tray. Based on Simon Garrity’s story, Exam is a decidedly smaller-scale endeavour: a taut 100-minute chamber-piece in which the camera hardly leaves a single windowless space.
Here we find eight diverse – but mainly youthful and photogenic – candidates assembled for an exam. This is the final hurdle in a long job application process, designed to find an assistant for the mysterious boss of a vast, omnipotent bio-tech conglomerate. First surprise: the exam papers appear totally blank. With a wall-mounted clock ticking down their allotted hour, the ambitious bunch must work together if they’re to have any hope of finding the required answers or even discovering the question.
The devious mind games that ensue reveal Hazeldine’s familiarity with previous closed-room enterprises: the papa of the sub-genre, Sartre’s 1940s hell-is-other-people play Vicious Circle, as well as rather more recent films such as Das Experiment (2001) and Vincenzo Natali’s micro-budget but enduringly influential Cube (1997).
This type of drama always places enormous emphasis on the performers and it’s to the actors’ credit that they make their (nameless) characters convincing and credible here. It’s a tight ensemble, but Luke Mably as a swaggering City-trader type dominates both the group and the film. Colin Salmon is a droll delight in his limited screen time as the sternly laconic invigilator.
The single-set gimmick also demands meticulous tightness of structure from start to finish, so it’s unfortunate that Hazeldine introduces a fantastical subplot involving a global pandemic – a ploy which feels like an artificial and opportunistically topical attempt to up the ante. A couple of clever final act twists get the picture back on track, but overall Exam can’t help exuding the air of a project that would better suited to the small screen domain of Alan Sugar and his stony-faced cohorts.
Spread sees highly-regarded Scots director David Mackenzie film outside these shores for the first time. His four previous features The Last Great Wilderness (2002), Young Adam (2003), Asylum (2005) and Hallam Foe (2007) generally proved more popular with critics than audiences, but the shift to United States locations for the genial but forgettable Spread seems unlikely to boost his standing with either constituency.
Set in the kind of sun-blasted Los Angeles familiar from David Hockney’s canvases, it is clearly intended as a morality tale for our culturally-debased times. Barely off-screen – and when we can’t see him, we hear his narration – throughout the 90-odd minute running time is toothsome, well-endowed, perennially cash-strapped 20-something Nikki (Ashton Kutcher), a gigolo servicing the bored wives of Beverly Hills and its swanky environs.
Scriptwriter Jason Dean Hall clearly swotted up on American Gigolo, Shampoo and Midnight Cowboy before turning on his word processor, but he provides Mackenzie – who on available evidence is no Paul Schrader, Hal Ashby or John Schlesinger – with a thorny little puzzle: how to make a non-vacuous film about a vacuous, shallow character.
The director doesn’t quite manage it. What we get is an episodic, only fitfully involving affair. The plot, such as it is, sees solipsistic Nikki drifting amorally between various bored, rich women, including Anne Heche’s tough but sympathetic lawyer Samantha, before meeting his match – in more ways than one – in the form of “waitress” Heather (Margarita Levieva).
Playing itself, Los Angeles looks pretty good in the background, especially the hilltop house which supposedly once “belonged to Peter Bogdanovich” – an in-joke that goes absolutely nowhere. Then again, what can you expect from a movie that doesn’t even seem to know how to spell its own main character’s name? He scribbles a note and clearly signs it “Nikki”, but he’s identified as “Niki” in the end credits.
Neil Young
