from safety to where...?

A man is awakened in the middle of the night by screams and the approaching heat of an infernal wall of flames. “We got to find a way out! Everybody, come on!” a man outside yells. And then a woman’s agonizing scream is heard. “Where are you!” she screams. We can’t see the flames. We can’t see the people scurrying for safety. All we see is Viggo Mortensen’s character, whose character is simply named the Man, preparing a bath for his family’s survival.

The Road is a staggering film about love and survival and the themes that connect those concepts. The film thrives on the stark reality the Man and his son, the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee), face in a post-apocalyptic world in which most life has been destroyed. Those who survived The End wander ashen landscapes searching for food while dodging roving packs of cannibals. The sun is obscured, and the Man and the Boy are on the move, headed to the States’ southern coast, where they hope it’ll be warmer. There is little dialogue in the film – the story unfolds through the bleak but beautiful visual desolation and is told through a series of emotional flashbacks. The flashbacks are shot in brilliant color, which contrasts the colorless pallor of the new world.

The Road is so arresting because it balances on the power and pain of memory. The Boy is too young to remember life before The End, he knows nothing else (when stumbling upon a stash of canned goods, he doesn’t recognize them for what they are), but the Man, despite the years that have passed since The End, struggles to reconcile his present life with the choices he and others, particularly his wife, made long ago. The film’s realness also struck me; obviously, no one knows what the world will look like if it is consumed by massive destruction, but The Road paints a disturbingly vivid picture of how things could be. (In fact, many of the panoramic views of destruction are actual images from the aftermaths of Hurricane Katrina and the Mount St. Helens eruption.) That picture is made even more real with great performances by Mortensen and Smit-McPhee (who was twelve years old during filming). And despite his brief camera time, Robert Duvall is captivating as the Old Man.

The Road is a perfect, albeit bleak, film. Movies that revolve around such age-old topics like love and survival often collapse in clichés and syrupy dialogue. The Road avoids these traps because it uses the emotional gravity of its characters’ dilemmas to tell the story, eliminating the need for excessive speech. The pictures speak infinite, and the backstory propels the tale. I highly recommend The Road and give it 5 out of 5. Definitely check it out.

[The Road was released in late 2009; it’s directed by John Hillcoat and written by Joe Penhall and based on the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name.]

xx

(Big ups to A² for the recommendation – you were dead on with this one.)