(Mute/EMI)

Nick’s surprisingly sentimental apocalypse

It’s no surprise that director John Hillcoat asked Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (one of Cave’s Bad Seeds) to create the soundtrack for his adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. For starters, Hillcoat and Cave have history: Cave and Ellis wrote the soundtrack for Hillcoat’s previous film, The Proposition, and Cave himself wrote the script. Then there’s the connection Cave has with McCarthy: like McCarthy, Cave’s early fiction takes the style of a William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor and infuses it with hyperbolic nastiness. In that sense, Cave and Ellis doing the soundtrack for The Road was near inevitable. But was that the right decision? The soundtrack itself gives mixed answers. Cave and Ellis render McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic landscape in shades of Western by utilising the piano and violin in an unashamedly folky manner, and while this may render The Road true to McCarthy’s other books, it brings a hint of homeyness to what ought to be an uncompromisingly alien mise-en-scene. Cave and Ellis thus aid and abet Hillcoat’s decision to bring out the latent sentimentality in McCarthy’s novel in order to make the film a little more palatable for mainstream audiences. While Hillcoat’s decision was undoubtedly pragmatic rather than malicious, it’s surprising that Cave and Ellis, with only a few exceptions (such as the nightmarish strings in the cellar scene, or the cultish droning that introduces the cannibals) are willing to rip some of the teeth out of McCarthy’s apocalypse.

***½

CHAD PARKHILL

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