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Review: The Road
Directed by John Hillcoat
Written by Joe Penhall (based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy)
Starring: Viggo Mortensen (Man), Kodi Smit-McPhee (Boy), Robert Duvall (Old Man), Guy Pearce (Veteran), and Charlize Theron (Woman).
Rated: MA for strong violence, language and disturbing themes
"The world gets colder week-by-week as the world slowly dies. No animals have survived. All the crops are long gone. Someday all the trees in the world will have fallen. The roads are peopled by refugees towing carts and road gangs looking for fuel and food. There has been cannibalism. Cannibalism is the great fear. Mostly I worry about food. Always food. Food and our shoes. Sometimes I tell the boy old stories of courage and justice, difficult as they are to remember. All I know is the child is my warrant and if he is not the word of God, then God never spoke."
Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road gutted me emotionally. It was an extraordinary read – horrific, haunting and harrowing - and so I awaited the movie adaptation with a mixture of anticipation and knowing dread. And the film didn’t disappoint on either count. Director John Hillcoat (Ghosts of the Civil Dead) is one of the most underrated, yet intensely engaging directors of our age. Like his vision of the Australian outback in The Proposition, he has virtually personified the landscape of the mysterious, blackened road snaking through the grey, alien wastelands of a future America. His cast is absolutely stellar: Viggo Mortensen (The History of Violence) in a career best, along with brilliant newcomer, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and a superb ensemble which includes Charlize Theron (Monster), Robert Duvall (The Apostle) and Guy Pearce (Memento) in minor but impactful roles.
Yet, the real performer is clearly the script. Though Joe Penhall tinkers in places with the original narrative, adding more developed flashbacks of the family home, as well as omitting the book’s more horrendous scenes, the movie works largely because of its fidelity to the source material. McCarthy’s story is rendered here in all its stark simplicity: a father and son trek across a wretched, post-apocalyptic landscape following an unnamed road toward the sea in the hope of life. Hillcoat beautifully captures the love between the Man and the Boy (“each the other’s world entire”), the debilitating grind of their perpetual hunger and insecurity, their intense distrust and fear of strangers, and their simple joy in discovering food or drinking soda for the first time. Yet, like the book, the story reveals something deeply profound about the dark underbelly of humanity, cut adrift from the gracious restraint of civilisation, government and law - a grown-up Lord of the Flies, if you like. In the light of an unknown global calamity, anarchy rules, the weak are casually plundered, and men savagely devour others – figuratively and literally. It is a world seemingly forgotten by God. Yet, as long as the Boy lives, symbolising the last vestige of divine goodness and purpose, there is faith and hope in the world.
Herein lies the key to this difficult film: being intimately drawn into the Man and Boy’s mutual love and desire for survival. Within a few frames of the film you are walking in the Man’s worn out shoes: a distraught, vigilant father protecting his young, naive son from starvation, disease and mercenary bands of thieves and cannibals. You feel his anxiety in fighting for his son’s life, and his dilemma in weighing up survival against the lives of others and his own moral integrity. All this begs the question, what would you do in the same circumstances? How far would you go to stay alive and preserve the life of your son? At what point would you put a gun to your boy’s young head and pull the trigger?
It’s interesting that we so easily identify with the Man and the Boy and not the vast majority of humans in the film: the thieves, marauders and murders. But you have to wonder what our self-assured goodness would look like in the face of this terrible disease, starvation and death. In such a scenario, could humanity save itself and bring itself back from self-destruction? Would the fire keep burning or would it be snuffed out by the collective desire for survival?
Even though The Road may leave you with a glimmer of hope, there is little in this film to sustain a belief in the innate goodness and altruism of humanity as a whole. Sure there are individual moments of love and self-sacrifice, but they are so starkly go against the grain of human nature. They will not ultimately turn the overwhelming tide of savagery, egoism and self-preservation. Given the chance, humanity will turn in and devour itself. We need more than the spark of a few torch-bearers to bring light and life to the darkness and death. We need an extraordinary saviour to accomplish that feat, nothing short of “the light of the world” (John 8:12). Indeed, like the two travelers on the road in Luke’s gospel, we need the crucified and resurrected Lord, to open our minds and set our hearts on fire (Luke 24:32). No one else will set us on the narrow path to salvation and hope (John 14:6).
So make no mistake, The Road is bleak and dark because the world it reveals is bleak and dark. It will make you wince and recoil at times. It will crawl under your skin and linger in your thoughts for days. Yet it’s worth watching because it will push you to reflect on the contorted nature of an unchecked, fallen humanity. And it will provoke you to wonder who can carry “the fire” of hope in the black night of despair … without God, the loving Father, Son and Spirit.
By Mark Barry
7/2/2010
