Austin Film Festival Wednesday
It's the end of the world, and we feel terrible
The Road
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When watching a locally shot feature, you can always amuse yourself during the boring parts by trying to spot familiar backgrounds and locations. And a good rule of thumb for determining how effective said locally shot feature is would be how much time one spends engaging with its characters versus how much time one spends wondering, "Hey, is that Burnet Road?"
It's actually important to establish rules like that when watching a movie like Holy Hell, because there's a tendency to identify with and root for the small-time Austin filmmaker no matter the product, which can make it hard to be objective. And objectively speaking, Holy Hell is an easy movie to watch—despite some odd camera lag here and there that occasionally makes it look as though it’s being buffered in from the web, and even if the plot loses some of its cohesion as it nears the third act. But speaking with a whole lot of bias, it’s great to see a cast made up of some of the leading lights of Austin's theater community turn up in a feature co-written by Rude Mechanicals’ Lowell Bartholomee. (Surprisingly, the most captivating of the film's performances comes from Ken Edwards, whose stage résumé is considerably lighter than those of his castmates.) Holy Hell’s concept is fairly rough and just a shade beyond believable: A financially destitute church decides that the best way to refill its coffers is to make an independent horror movie—because as any AFF entrant can tell you, self-produced feature filmmaking is the quickest path to solvency. The lightly comic plot lends itself to easy gags and some predictable cheap shots, but it tempers these with some more thoughtful moments that save it from being a wannabe Waiting For Guffman. There's also a much-publicized guest appearance by drinky crow columnist and America’s most famous atheist Christopher Hitchens, who seems only dimly aware that he's acting in a movie at all. Even with its faults, the performances of Edwards, Kenneth Wayne Bradley, and Liz Fisher keep the focus squarely on the characters and their story, rather than the local landmarks.
There’s nothing but character and story to draw on in post-apocalyptic downer The Road—and all the landmarks were burned to the ground years ago—but then, that’s an enviable position to be in when your characters and story come from straight from a Cormac McCarthy novel. In a way it’s obvious why The Road’s release date has been delayed so many times, despite with its pedigree, Oprah’s stamp of approval, and big stars like Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, and Robert Duvall: Even in a year where our films seem to have blackened and curdled in response to our national unease—something we’ve definitely seen reflected in all the films screening this week—The Road is as unrelentingly bleak as the ashen landscape Mortensen's nameless protagonist and son, Kodi Smit-McPhee, are forced to wander searching vainly for a night’s shelter. In other words, it’s not exactly the sort of thing you expect audiences to flock to, but that’s what you get for trying to make art instead of Mad Max And Son. As Roland Emmerich could tell you, audiences like their apocalypses big and loud with lots of shit blowing up real good—not so much with the uniformly gray and quiet with lots of existential fretting about whether life is worth living when it’s been reduced to mere survival.
How dark is it? Well, within the first 20 minutes we’re treated to a delightful “rolling in your own vomit” moment and Mortensen graphically demonstrating to his 9-year-old kid how to blow his own brains out “when the time comes,” a plot point that hangs with grim inevitability over the entire film. Still, fans of the novel may be surprised to find that director John Hillcoat has shaved some of the gorier aspects from the book like [SPOILER ALERT] the infamous roasting-babies-on-a-spit scene [END SPOILER] while simultaneously playing up the ever-present threat of the cannibals in a decidedly more conventional way—ostensibly to make The Road more marketable to horror fans. But fortunately, it stops just short of devolving into standard zombie fare, as the chief villain lurking just out of frame here is still the pervading sense of futility that colors their every difficult step. And rather than turning those barren, ruined landscapes into a series of exploitative set-pieces that might appeal to connoisseurs of disaster movies, Hillcoat uses them commendably sparingly, lending them all the more visceral power for how matter-of-factly they’re presented.
