Hit the Road

"Long takes statically home in on the characters, who are often inside the vehicle in close vicinity to the camera, whose unspoken emotion and poignant expression is what audience dwells on. As an impending departure is on the horizon, feigned playfulness flakes off a mother's face and bares irrepressible sorrow; a father's habitual sulkiness morphs into resigned tenderness and advice-dispensing, yet his prolong incapacitation (with one injured leg in plaster cast) might take on a more figurative signification here. The only constant is the younger son, whose bratty, sassy cuteness inclines to get under one's skin in no time.

However, when the chips are down, a fixed wide shot keeps the emotional leave-taking in the yonder, a scenic composition with people reduced to ciphers, but its effect is no less impactful, the mother's scurrying desperation is all the more visceral in one's imagination. After a botched last goodbye, HIT THE ROAD finishes with a threnody for the moribund pet dog, vicariously it is also for the departed, but the lip-syncing gimmick seems to push the film towards mawkishness."

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