The Road (3.5/5)
(John Hillcoat) 16
It’s Complicated (3/5)
(Nancy Meyers) 15A
Treeless Mountain (3/5)
(So Yong Kim) G
It Might Get Loud (3/5)
(David Guggenheim) PG

You would think the world had ended in 2009, such was the collective hullabaloo. If there was any doubt in the new year that it hadn’t, along comes The Road to remind us what the end of the world really looks like. It should be required viewing for snivelling whingers: see how bad it could get? Now shut up.
The Road, then, journeys to the closure of humanity. The post-apocalyptic world is an ashen wasteland. The sun is dimmed to a crepuscular shade. The earth groans sadly. Telephone poles lie toppled as if they no longer have the strength to stay standing. Trees stand naked and dead, the wind a shivering sigh. What is left of mankind’s imprint lies ransacked and empty. Unlike most films where the plaintive music is spread thickly on top, Nick Cave’s score isn’t even needed: to just see this is to experience apocalypse wow.
The film, from The Proposition director John Hillcoat, follows almost to the letter the eponymous Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy. This was a book so atmospherically powerful that I found myself buying tinned food after reading it, just in case. Its recreation on the screen is a depressing marvel. As in the novel, the nature of end days is never explained. We are just left to witness what becomes of man in its aftermath.
All that helter-skelter of the Hollywood doomsday picture is exchanged for a forlorn weariness. You can see it etched into the face of Viggo Mortensen, a character called the Man, who escorts his son, the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) towards the coast. Mortensen is all taciturn and noble bearing. He has that raw manliness you need to guide you through danger and the intelligence to try and make sense of what can’t be made sense of. His voiceover is exhausted and leaden, for the world is almost empty. “How many people do you think are still alive?” the Boy asks him. “In the world? Not very many.”
They have a lot to deal with. They need food and shoes. They are so ragged, in one tracking shot, that the camera passes them slowly by and they cannot keep up. Mostly, they have to avoid becoming food themselves. They push a trolley full of odds and ends and a truck rumbles slowly out of a tunnel behind them, its engine growling like some kind of monster. But the only monsters here are what is left of mankind, and those on board the truck are cannibals prowling the wastelands for human meat.
The Road is all about the Boy. The Man asks a gang member what they are eating. He responds with a sly smile and a glance at the Boy: “Whatever we can find”. What keeps the Man going is a responsibility to his son: to keep him alive, to educate him, to teach him morality in the complete absence of it, to uphold the last vestiges of civilisation. But he also teaches him how to shoot himself, just in case. In a flashback, we see his mother (Charlize Theron) give up the fight, arguing with the Man about suicide.
This is a film without comfort, almost without reprieve, a desolate wasteland of despair. Out of the dimness and dismantling of humanity shines the occasional small joy. A wash and a brushing of teeth is a kind of bliss. A tin of found spam is a Bacchanalian soiree.
In his novel, McCarthy scratched off the veneer of civilisation and stripped mankind to bare bones. He wanted to see what was left: why do we want to keep on living when there is nothing to live for? What is the hold children have on their parents? These are ineffable mysteries, though McCarthy took us as close to the edge of understanding as we could hope to get. Hillcoat shows serious concern with the visual textures of the film. But little of the book’s philosophy bubbles to the surface.
If McCarthy’s book has reached the status of a modern classic, it is perhaps because the language itself is not a tool but is embedded in its meaning. The words reach around you with almost suffocating strength, beauty lurching out from death. Here, there is little beauty. Just a grim weariness you are glad to be shorn of.
Meryl Streep is all autumnal beauty in It’s Complicated, a rom-com from Nancy Meyers, director of What Women Want. What Streep’s Jane wants, or actually needs, is to loosen up. She’s divorced 10 years and runs a successful bakery, but her sex life is cooling in the fridge. Streep initially feeds off awkwardness and spends the first 10 minutes doing reaction shots: at her indifferent grown-up kids, at the diaphanous young wife of her ex-husband Jake (Alec Baldwin) or at a canoodling couple in a lift.
But can an ex ever be an ex after 20 years of marriage? Baldwin looks well-fed but his Jake misses Jane’s food. He purrs like a smooth cat and suddenly he’s an ex with benefits. Then Steve Martin’s architect Adam shows up and he has designs on her too.
Streep shakes Jane alive and is a lovely presence. She enjoys sex, smokes pot, and gets emotionally confused. She’s awkward in front of her ex with her body, but the film is never unkind to her. For It’s Complicated is a song of praise to women in middle age.
The pace, too, is middle-aged. There are times when it feels like it should nod off for a nap. Then there are the indulgent montages: Streep getting drunk, Streep having fun, Streep scratching her nose, Streep baking. (All that gorgeous food is an advertisement for the nice life. Don’t watch it on an empty stomach.) But there are moments too of twinkling comedy. I doubt that Baldwin’s brilliant “Home sweet home” line was even in the script.
It’s Complicated makes the case that older women are beautiful. It helps, obviously, when you have Streep in the lead role. There’s a gentle nod to The Graduate, but here, the older woman gets the man. The question is which man.
In Treeless Mountain, an Ozu-inspired film from South Korean writer and director So Yong Kim, the gaze adopts the point of view of children. It is a film so gentle it could come apart in your hands.
There’s Jin (Hee Yeon Kim), a seven-year-old moppet with a helmet of dark hair, and Bin (Song Hee Kim), her tiny sister. Their mother (Soo Ah Lee) is an addled woman with a tired face and can’t look after them any more. So they are dumped with an unloving, neglectful aunt (Mi Hyang Kim) who doesn’t feed them. “You two are a real pain,” she says.
Kim handles the slide into neglect with skill. She films the story with the kind of naturalism that looks misleadingly easy, while she draws a remarkable performance from Hee Yoen Kim. Where we are used to the look-at-me extroversion of Hollywood child actors, here, the performances are introverted yet full of spirit. What you understand about Jin is etched in her face.
True to her unforced style, Kim wants for an ending that feels natural. But where Ozu could open a door from an ordinary moment into something transcendental, Treeless Mountain remains underwhelming.
David Guggenheim’s affectionate documentary, It Might Get Loud, is ostensibly an homage to the electric guitar. It’s really about the attitudes and inspiration of three seminal players: Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, U2’s The Edge and Jack White of The White Stripes/The Raconteurs.
White is all gurning authenticity, recounting his formative days learning the blues in downtrodden Detroit. The Edge revisits Mount Temple School and fiddles with a delay pedal while facing the Irish Sea. And Page recounts his remarkable journey from skiffle to stadium stratosphere. The trio sit on a stage, chat and play riffs. The Edge looks uneasy off-the-cuff. White is all off-the-cuff. But the real star of the show is Page. He whips out the opening riff of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and the Edge leaps out of his seat to get a closer look. He stands with White, the pair grinning like smitten kittens.