A Bleak Road Well-made and Well-traveled

It is officially the season of giving and sharing and hope and family cherishing…so what better time to contemplate the end of the world and humanity’s descent into an impossibly bleak hell of their own making? No, I’m not talking about 2012. I’m talking about The Road, superbly directed by John Hillcoat and adapted by Joe Penhall from the lauded 2006, Pulitzer Prize-winning Cormac McCarthy novel. 2012, with a price tag of $200 million, cost ten times the amount of the long-gestating The Road, but Hillcoat’s foray into the storied post- apocalyptic genre is the film that will endure in the public consciousness in the years to come. It’s a harrowing, relentlessly grim, emotionally-affecting, visceral, and often awe-inspiring ride that does rise to the level of art.

Art—when applied to film—is a term that often makes me uncomfortable. What is generally referred to as film art or an art film is usually exactly the kind of film I find to be impossibly pretentious, tedious, self-important and stiff, completely antithetical to the movies I watch and hope to make. But The Road manages to enter the realm of art while always remaining enthralling and emotionally engaging, and instead of pulling you out of the story, the film always keeps you completely entrenched in the immediacy of the moment. The three principals—Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Charlize Theron—are first-rate, and the film boasts two exceptional cameos, one by an almost unrecognizable Robert Duvall, the other by Guy Pearce.

The film plunges you right into what it would be like to try to be an ordinary man trying to protect yourself and your son from a seemingly insurmountable foe: the world. This is a world that doesn’t make sense, and we are never given any remote explanation as to who or what caused this apocalypse, the death of every animal and the destruction of the earth. The world of The Road is one in which all remnants of any kind of civilization have been obliterated. Here, everyone lives only for themselves and care nothing about their fellow man. People will do anything to survive, including eating each other. The central question the film explores is how do you survive and protect the ones you love from unspeakable devastation and barbarism without compromising your integrity and sense of honor? Is survival worthy as the ultimate goal, or does there come a point when the struggle to survive becomes worse than death?

For Mortensen’s wife (Theron), the answer to that question is indeed that death is a better option than trying to survive in an insane world. We see glimpses of Mortensen—referred to in the film only as “Man”—and his former life with his wife and son, first on the eve of the apocalypse and then in the beginning of the end. These glimpses are fragmented and only impressionistic in nature, but they effectively show the love he had for his wife and the love she had for him and their son. But she was not willing to walk the road with them, to go on this impossible journey. After failing to convince Mortensen that it would be—if not more humane, than at least a better solution—to use their revolver and two remaining bullets to kill herself and her son, she disappears into the night to die, leaving Mortensen the Herculean task of trying to take care of his young son.

From reading that description you might think that Theron was a cold hearted horror of a human being, but the performances are so strong that you understand her choice and feel sympathy for her. These sequences are also set apart from the rest of the film visually, as Hillcoat and his team elect to use a brighter, warmer color palette that contrasts sharply with the intensely gray, dreary, decayed and bleak world the Man and the Boy (Smit-McPhee) find themselves in. The visuals truly are remarkable in this film. Almost every single shot, every composition you could freeze-frame and blow out as a piece of art.  The film was shot entirely on location in Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Oregon, and I counted at least five different special effects companies in the end credits—digital matte paintings and the like. This is how special effects should be used, to augment and enhance an already brilliant frame, not as the basis of the frame itself—not to mention the story.

The Road by its very title is framed by the conventions or at least structure of the classical adventure narrative. You have two characters on a journey, facing immense physical and psychological perils and meeting remarkable and usually dangerous characters along the way. It would not be a reach to put The Road in the same pantheon of The Odyssey. Whereas Odysseus is trying to make the long journey home, the Man and the Boy are trying to head south to the water and gentler weather. They only have a vague sense of where they are going and in all honesty, the Man doesn’t know what they will find there. But there is no alternative but to believe that a better life exists somewhere. Anywhere.

There are some really intense action sequences that got my heart pounding, but it is the quiet, father-and-son moments in between that make the film special. There is even a moment where we see the Man teaching his son the best way to blow his brains out with their revolver in case he is about to be eaten by cannibals and has no alternative. Yeah, that’s not a scene you would expect to see in most commercial movies that are released.

The film is relentlessly bleak but oddly enough, that is partly what makes the film so enrapturing. It never feels overwhelming or sour or nasty. It’s just a realistic depiction of a world almost unimaginable. Hillcoat is a guy to really watch. His previous feature, The Proposition, is an equally grim and equally potent fair that takes place in Australia in the 1880s. It is a Western, and one of the darkest ever made. Check it out if you haven’t seen it already and then go see The Road. It ain’t exactly Frosty the Snowman, but it will make you feel almost as good.