The Road
The Road doesn’t answer many questions, not what happened, not who these people are, or where they are. It’s enough to know that Before is irretrievably gone forever, there is only Now. Now is after a cataclysmic event (my companion posited an extinction event comet strike) that has wiped out most of humanity, all animals, all vegetation, and blotted out the sun in an ashy permanent winter. Humanity is nothing but predator and prey to itself now, and our nameless leads Man and Boy (Viggo Mortenson and Kodi Smit-McPhee) are just trying to survive. The apocalypse put them here, but The Road is about their journey to live through this. Who they are or why they are doesn’t matter any more.
One question I had, while watching them scrabble for food and warmth and safety, is survive through what? What is on the other side of this struggle except more of this struggle? This film will set your mind down many empathetic paths as our leads find themselves in one life or death situation after another. The boy was born after the cataclysm, and knows no other existence. His father knew life as we know it, and is perhaps more haunted by his memories that either of them are by the routine horrors they encounter daily.
Scenes are visually monochromatic but still stunning in its stark images of destruction. This is no routine zombie apocalypse with green trees and running rivers. Javier Aguirresarobe’s camera paints for us the bleak greyness of permanent ashfall, denuded trees, choked grasses, and still winds. The entire sound departments needs to just go down and pick up their Oscars now. The muffled air, the rumbling tectonic murmurs, the groaning and incessant tree deaths, sounds of other humans, all these sounds sell the bleak images (some, incredibly, were stock photography) as a completely dying world. Mortenson (managing somehow still not to look as dirty as he did in Lord of the Rings) plays The Man with the same fierce intensity he brought to Eastern Promises. Smit-McPhee is surprisingly dewy and childlike considering the only world he has known, proving the resilience of a child and of a person to become used to nearly everything. Both of them do a terrific job connecting with us and each other. They look cold and hungry, their fear wafts off the screen, and they carry the fire. To where and for how long, one can only guess.
It is a profound movie to have open on Thanksgiving weekend, our bellies distended by feasting as we watch our heroes pick through garbage for dead insects to eat. They are father and son (mother Charlize Theron chose a different path) and their strength is in each other. I had heard it described as depressing – and mind you, it’s far from hilarious – but I found it to be beautifully sobering. While most of humanity devolves into Reavers, a few pockets of “good guys” remain. What is right and wrong gets as fuzzy as the distance when it comes to survival. My companion reminded me of a paraphrase from a book we had read, also concerning the aftermath of a extinction event: society lives by the morals it can afford. Society is gone, beyond bankrupt, but why help humanity survive if we are to lose it by the means of survival?
Joe Penhall adapted Cormac McCarthy’s book in such a way that little feels as if it is missing, though of course surely plenty had to be cut; it makes me want to read it. You might recognize McCarthy’s name as the author of the book No Country For Old Men. The Road lacks the bursts of creepiness of No Country in favor of a generalized dread. This film is not uplifting or cheerful, but it’s profoundly affecting, and I hope you give it a chance. I give it Full Price Feature because I can find nothing wrong and nothing not giving its full money’s worth.
MPAA Rating R-violence, disturbing images, language
Release date 11/25/09
Time in minutes 112
Director John Hillcoat
Studio Dimension
