The Road (2009)

There’s been a far amount of apocalyptic films lately, but Australian director John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, is probably the most depressing in the whole genera. A film for those who feel Bergman too upbeat, it has an unequaled and penetrating aura of futility, hopelessness and despair. The film concerns a nameless father and son (Viggo Mortensen & Kodi Smith-McPhee respectively, both excellent) scavenging for food, fuel and heat in the aftermath of an unspecified and continuing ecological disaster that has killed off all plant life, animal life, and the vast majority of humans. Set roughly seven years into the disaster the Earth is a dull ashen gray place of dead trees and broken buildings, the sky is ever overcast, earthquakes are frequent, and as Mortensen notes near the beginning, cannibalism has started to become a problem. I was expecting more battles with cannibalistic survivalist in this film as that’s such a troupe of the genera, and while there are some close encounters the horror of the film is not so much in the blood, as it is the utter sense of loss and futility. Seven years into the death of the world and its perfectly possible no one lives to see the 10th.

Most survivors who haven’t gone over to cannibalism are to weak to do much of anything, and its pretty obvious to all that there is nothing to be done. The most fascinating, character motivating thing about Mortensen’s nameless wander is his love for his son, and his seemingly psychological inability to give up. He says again near the beginning of the film that the child is his warrant, born to his now presumably dead wife (her fate is never fully explained) months into these bitter end times, Mortensen has done everything in his power to keep him alive, eating vestiges of canned food, crumbs of grain, a few dead insects. He knows that he’s only delaying the inevitable, a smart once sophisticated and successful man he’s not prone to illusions about most things, yet he simply must keep his son alive, despite having no really ‘good’ reason to. He keeps a gun with two bullets for what he assumes will be their eventual mutual suicide when things become just to harsh, or escape from the cannibals to unlikely, yet he questions if he’ll be able to do it when the time comes. His refusal to give up, and his sons embodiment of what remains of innocence and decency, serve I suppose in and of themselves as the only things of ultimate value in the film. In what I must call an atheistic movie, where there is no rhyme or reason for what happened, no foreordained triumph of good over evil, no hope of civilization, let alone the human race surviving beyond a handful of more years, it is the thought that some men might maintain a little of their decency, of their humanity in spite of all this, and not give in to nihilism, that constitutes the spiritual core of the film. This an extremely well done, profound movie, but so tense, even draining that I feel the odd compulsion to both recommend, and advise against seeing The Road. If your up for it though you won’t soon forget it. Thumbs Up.