Back with renewed vigor after a day two lay-off and a fantastic Superbowl...
#6: The Road
Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road is an amazing book. It's hard to pull yourself away from it (I read it in under 24 hours), it is psychological intense and realistic, and it's maybe the best post-apocalyptic story every told. So, clearly, the bar was set pretty high for this film adaptation.
Like almost always, the movie didn't quite reach the heights of the book, but it's a pretty damn good movie.
It's weird to call a post-apocalyptic story "realistic" since nobody really knows what it would be like, but if the conditions are anything like this, I feel pretty confident that this is what the world will be like. Mostly, a whole lotta nothing. Just the basics, eat, sleep, stay alive. And it would be really dirty. The few that survive will generally fall into two camps: those who will do anything to survive, and those who will try to survive and retain their morality from the world before (plus a third group of those who die as victims of cannibalism or by their own hand). As such, The Road, is kind of a slow film, in that actual events can seem few and far between, but it doesn't always feel slow, as horrific death could lie around every bend in the road.
Naturally, the heroes of this story fall into the second category of people: a father (Viggo Mortensen*) and a son heading toward the coast in search of some remnant of civilization. And, like the novel, this is where the truest strength of the story lies. For all the depressingly precise imagining of the end of the world, The Road is a love story.
* In all seriousness, Viggo probably deserved a Best Actor nom. I didn't see Colin Firth or Morgan Freeman's performances, but I thought Mortensen outplayed Jeremy Renner (Hurt Locker) and George Clooney (Up in the Air) even though those two were excellent. I'm not surprised Viggo was excluded, but a movie like this asks a tremendous amount of its lead and he delivered.
In this barren world, the only thing that keeps the man going is trying to give his son a life. There is a wonderful scene [SPOILER ALERT] when the man and the boy encounter an old man (played brilliantly by Robert Duvall) and, at the boy's insistence, they share a campfire together. The old man tells Viggo that he never thought he would see a child again and that when he did, he thought he had died and that the boy was an angel. To this Viggo responds, "He is an angel. To me he's a god." This, more than perhaps anything else in the movie, illustrates the love that the man has for his son. In a world where there is seemingly nothing left but savagery in people, the man has something to believe in, the one good thing left in the world. This belief gives him the power to sacrifice anything, his own well-being the well-being of strangers, so that his god can stay alive.
The man is a noble character, selfless to the extreme. But in a world of diminishing resources, he must make difficult decisions, many that his son, an empathetic and trusting boy, does not understand. Some of the hard decisions the man makes even make the boy angry with him, but even this is a consequence that the man is willing to endure. While, of course, the boy could never stop loving his father, the man will even risk his son loving him back if it means keeping his son alive.
It is an unavoidable fact that we are each the lens of our experiences, and, as not an orphan or anybody's estranged son, I could only view this film as a son with my own father who matches or even exceeds the nobility of Viggo's character. As bizarre as it is to envision one's self in the desolate reality of The Road, the similarities between the story I was witnessing and the one that I felt would inevitably unfold if I, as a boy, and my own father were in this dark world, became too many to ignore. Once I let myself fully succumb to this comparison, the film really began to take hold of me and, in a weird way, it became a twisted, tragic Field of Dreams. With the beard, Viggo even looked a little my own dad from time to time. As a result, there probably wasn't a movie I saw this year that was more emotional for me than this one as I was completely wrapped up in the two characters by about the mid-point. So while I can't claim that everyone will have the involvement I had, this movie seems to have been made for people who have/had/are a father like mine.
I was also pleasantly surprised at the way the movie dodged what I figured would be the two biggest downfalls of the adaptation. Firstly, and quite simply, child actors can rarely achieve the heights of their literary counterparts. Kodi McPhee, who plays the boy, wasn't perfect, but he was more than good enough to make the film work. For a kid robbed of his childhood and a normal life, he struck an excellent balance between showing the slivers of youth that would still exist but also the hardened, detachment needed to stay alive in this bleak future. The second pitfall was that since of the novel is mostly the thoughts of the man, I knew they would have to create the same worry and tension without the aid of explanation. This is one of the elements that will most clearly separate the two versions of this same story, but the film does an ample job of highlighting the mindset of the characters from the exterior.
While The Road isn't flawless, it can be as gripping and emotional as any of the year's films. It did seem to, at times, intentionally avoid drama (sometimes to its detriment) and the pace of the film could be difficult for some to deal with, but its complete envisioning of the post-disaster world and the strong, poignant performances make it a very worth-while, if melancholy, experience.
"All I know is the child is my warrant and if he is not the word of God, then God never spoke." - The Man
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