Journey to redemptionJourney to redemption
‘The Road’ leaves little room for morality in a post-apocalyptic world
By Carl Kozlowski 11/25/2009
Imagine that the world as you’ve known it has come to an end right before your eyes. Almost everyone has died or gone crazy, scavenging for food, even becoming cannibals to survive. Your beautiful wife, the light of your life, left you to wander off into the night and die rather than endure another terrifying day of huddling against the elements and hiding from the human monsters almost everyone else has become.
Now all that’s left is you and the 10-year-old son whose care has become your entire reason for living. You had a good life once — until just a decade before — with a dignified career, nights at the opera and joy radiating from every pore of your beautiful spouse. But now it’s all a memory, and a fading one at that. You haven’t been called by your own name in so long that you and your son are only known as Man and Boy.
What then? Do you keep a faith in God, or do you curse the hopelessness around you? Do you try to maintain the fire of a good soul and pass moral values to your son, or do you let your morals and humanity gradually slip away? If your morals disappear in the middle of nowhere, does anyone notice?
Those are the questions that lie at the core of director John Hillcoat’s profoundly moving adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Road.”
Starring Viggo Mortensen in an alternately feral and saintly performance of great emotional depth, “The Road” doesn’t
shy away from some of the most disturbing questions of human existence, guiding viewers gently through to a sense of grace and hope that will move — for days afterward — those brave enough to take the journey.
The film takes place against some of the most shockingly bleak landscapes (actually Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Oregon and Mt. St. Helen’s in Washington) one could ever imagine in America, with millions of downed and rotting trees and cities laid to utter waste. The film never explains whether the destruction was wrought by man-made actions such as nuclear warfare (which appears to be the case, due to the fact that Mortensen’s voiceover says that “all the clocks stopped at 1:17 a.m.” and in a flashback to that moment, he sees walls of flame reflecting off the glass of his home) or an environmental catastrophe (a theory bolstered by the fact that at least one more major tree-felling earthquake takes place in the course of the film). No blame is placed on mankind in either case for the moment of destruction; it is left a disturbing mystery — at the back of viewers’ minds but in a way that heightens the sense of dislocation and uncertainty.
Following the course of many storied desperate journeys, Man and Boy are heading in the vaguely defined direction of the ocean. The hope is that there, where the land ends, so does the destruction — that beauty will reappear and there will be an opportunity to float away to a better life in an unravaged corner of the world. Yet this fragile hope is often overwhelmed by the constant fear and isolation they have to contend with along the way, never quite knowing who to trust.
At one moment, they may be running for their lives from a roving band of cannibals that still look like normal, civilized humans. At another, they’re dodging a nasty rainstorm through a shivering night. Yet moments of joy come as well, as when they discover an underground nuclear shelter packed with edible food and warm beds and are able to have a semblance of their former lives for a few days — though they know it can’t last long.
There are brief, powerful cameos throughout the film, highlighted by Robert Duvall as a man whose eyes are blinded by cataracts and soul is shattered by the loss of his own son, and Charlize Theron as the wife who gradually loses all hope amid a series of flashbacks. They are among the better people that Man and Boy encounter, but the lesser-known Michael K. Williams also has a pivotal role as The Thief, a man who robs Man and Boy and then forms the ultimate ethical challenge for Man in whether to extract revenge or forgive him for his desperate act.
In the end, “The Road” is a modern-day parable about the need to maintain morals even when all moral framework seems lost. It is about maintaining a fire of righteousness even when surrounded by those who have gone wrong. And it is a film that, once seen, leaves a lasting imprint.
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