Editorial
Front Page - Friday, January 22, 2010
The Critic's Corner
David Laprad
I recently saw the best post apocalyptic movie ever made. Usually, films about the end of the world involve spectacular scenes of computer-generated destruction, but not “The Road.” Leaving the theater, I didn’t seem to have a single drop of adrenaline in my veins, as the film doesn’t contain much action. Rather, I felt satisfied on a deeper level, as though I’d just read a great novel.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find out there isn’t a single optical effect in “The Road.” There are some establishing shots showing devastated landscapes under an ashen sky, but even these scenes employ miniatures rather than CGI. The movie isn’t even clear about the cause of the ruin, although one could extrapolate from the oppressive weather that an asteroid smacked the Earth, ending life as we know it.
Instead of being about something terrible happening and the ensuing visual spectacle, “The Road” offers an intimate portrait of a relationship between a father and a son. Called Man and Boy, respectively, they travel south, sleeping in abandoned cars, avoiding cannibals and searching for scraps of food.
There’s not a speck of sunlight in the movie. When the father dreams, his mind goes back, not to better days, but to when he and his wife were hovering in a remote cabin, enduring the cold and getting by on a few cans of food. Years later, when their son appears to be 8 or 9, she walks into the woods to die, telling him, “They’ll find us, and when they do, you know what will happen.”
The father doesn’t even have a tearful goodbye to remember. “The coldness of it was her final gift to me,” he says. While sleeping in a car, he tries to remember making love to his wife, but a truck carrying a gang of cannibals emerges from a tunnel and jolts him out of his slumber.
The showdown that follows teaches viewers two things about the father: One, he has two bullets in his revolver, and two, he’ll put one of them in his son’s head before he allows anything terrible to happen to the boy. His love for his son is great, but his wife was right: He knows what the cannibals will do.
At this point, you’re probably thinking “The Road” does not sound like a good time at the movies, and in one sense, you’re right. It’s not the kind of film that goes well with popcorn and soda. It is, however, replete with thought provoking ideas.
After escaping the cannibals, the father asks the boy, “Do you have the fire?” His son doesn’t understand what he means, so he explains, saying the boy must do everything he can to hold on to his humanity. He must also search for others who are good.
Throughout the rest of “The Road,” the father struggles to pass these values on to his son as they fight to survive. In one scene, he orders a hungry man who stole their supplies to strip and leaves him shivering in the cold as his son watches. It’s a heart wrenching and visceral scene; you can sense the father’s anger, the other man’s desperation and the boy’s disbelief. You can feel the cold, too, in the marrow of your bones.
Front and center in “The Road” is Viggo Mortensen, who’s superb in the role of the father. Gone is the chiseled, muscular king of the “Lord of the Rings” movies. Instead, he exists within a shell of a man whose eyes contain no embers one could stir to life. Film actors delivered many great performances in 2009, but Mortensen’s turn in “The Road” stayed with me long after I saw the film.
For viewers looking for entertainment, “The Road” works as a thriller. There are two harrowing escape sequences and the man and his boy are sealed in a constant envelop of dread. There wasn’t a moment when I wasn’t tense with fear that the pair would drop dead from starvation or fall under the crosshairs of a cannibal.
But that’s not where the real value of “The Road” lies. Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, author of “No Country for Old Men,” it’s a cautionary tale about the fragile nature of the human spirit and how completely we rely on our environment. When our source of life is gone, the things that make us human will go with it, leaving self-consuming monsters in its wake. After seeing the movie, one might wonder how close we are to stepping past the point of no return.
If that sounds too heavy, then maybe you could take away something lighter. For instance, it’s easy these days to feel like the world is falling apart, but things aren’t as bad as they could be. At least not yet.
E-mail David Laprad at dlaprad@hamiltoncountyherald
.com.
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