I read The Road just after it came out, before Oprah, before the Pulitzer, and I thought it was okay. McCarthy is a graceful, beautifully descriptive writer with a limitless vocabulary, but if you've read one end of the world novel, you've read them all. Despite the level of detail McCarthy brought to the devastation of the landscape (and no one is better at describing landscapes than McCarthy - just read the Borders Trilogy), it was still an end of the world novel, wrought with cannibalism, collapsed highways, abandoned luxury homes, and desperate scavengers with tar-blackened skin and rotting teeth clinging to the last vestiges of hope and humanity. I thought the same thing of the movie.The Road has been brought to glorious life by the only director I thought capable of doing so without hamming it up into sentimental rubbish - John Hillcoat, director of the brutal, uncompromising McCarthy-like The Proposition. Viggo Mortensen lends A-list credentials to the marquee, and Charlize Theron shows up in endless flashbacks as his wife, before the shit hit the fan and the world caught on fire.
The film centers on Mortensen and his son (played by the wonderful child actor Kodi Smit-McPhee), and their quest to reach the Pacific coast across the devastation of the United States. Everything in this world is on fire or already reduced to ash. The roads and houses and burned out automobiles are covered in ash, and the sky itself is a gray blanket hovering over them, the sun never glimpsed. There is no food, no animals, no vegetation, just the occasional cricket or beetle, and the few scraps that can be scavenged from already-scavenged restaurants and houses.
It's a miracle to discover, amongst the ruins, the occasion can of Coke, still fizzy, especially when you were born into this devastation, and have no idea of the luxuries man once took for granted, like taking a shower, having electricity, having a car to drive around, a job, friends, sunny days, games of tag, friends, school, an education, a future. You see, that's the twist - Smit-McPhee was born after the world ended, so he has no frame of reference. All he knows is the ash and decay, and the constant creak of the falling trees. All he knows is the dead roots of the earth after the sky fell and God turned his back on man.
The Road could have developed into a morality tale - a father teaching his son how to live a gracious life despite what has been taken from them. Instead, for long stretches (as was so in the novel), it is just about their journey and how they survive, and Mortensen's flashbacks to his happy life, which snap him awake like nightmares. Only toward the end does the father attempt to teach his son anything of how to conduct himself. His lessons are harsh in the ways of survival and punishment, as when Mortensen has an attempted thief strip nude in the cold, and leaves him by the side of the road, despite his son's protests. Or when he casts away a blind beggar so he will not tax their food supply.
These are insignificant lessons scattered amongst scene after scene of father and son scrounging for food, walking through devastated spectacles, and hiding in the brush from roving bands of cannibals. It gets boring after awhile, especially since all of these scenes are represented just as effectively in a horror-comedy like Zombieland, in which we get the added bonus of satirical carnage and Bill Murray in living dead make-up.
The Road feels hollow. It is beautiful to look at, and I felt the devastation and hopelessness all around me, and I would not want to live in that world, but nothing of emotional weight transpires between the characters, and when the kid is left with a decision at the end, I didn't care either way which road he took.
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