Road

In the supposedly good old 20th-century days of Bob Hope and Hollywood studio productions, "Road" movies either co-starred Bing Crosby or featured a couple of stars going somewhere together romantic-comically, usually in a car across the States. Such positive escapist fare is more than a century away from The Road, a grim grey-and-brown adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel. Welcome to another movie dish of negative escapism.

The world, ie the USA, is suffering the aftermath of an unexplained natural disaster. All animals are extinct, crops cannot grow, trees collapse and the few human survivors seek sanctuary from "bad guys" who became cannibal gangs.

It isn't explained either why Charlize Theron left her husband (Viggo Mortensen) and young son and walked off into the night to die, in one of the movie's more brightly lit flashbacks. The newcomer who plays the boy is good and either he or Theron were cast because his facial looks resembled hers (or vice versa).

Superb cinematography (wide-angle long shots galorious) and credibly devastated landscapes and urban scenery (courtesy of CGI) depict a harsh, desolate world in which a solitary father treks from one disaster area to the next to protect his boy and train him for a future death.

Morbid? Miserable? Yes, and many other M words in the book, including memorable. There's rarely an excess frame in the tightly-edited tale that's a noir thriller. Its Australian director, John Hillcoat, began his career at home in 2006 with The Proposition, another thriller in an unexpected setting. That 19th-century colonial epic starred Guy Pearce, who loyally supports Hillcoat with a small cameo at the end of his second movie.

Robert Duvall also contributes one of the cameos designed to illustrate the conflicted, paranoid character of Mortensen's father figure. His constant urging of his son to be on the hopeful look-out for "good guys" is revealed in a bitter new light in Pearce's movie-ending deus-ex-machina appearance. How will the boy know that he's ended up with "good guys"? Look out for the dog. There's a depressing final twist in its tale.

Yes, it was obviously an artfully constructed novel, as is the movie. Mortensen and the boy actor make it credible. But, why oh why, do film producers feel obliged to maintain book titles that do not help attract potential movie audiences?