The Road

There are no yellow bricks on director John Hillcoat’s new movie The Road, and no rainbows at the end of it either. It’s an after-our-civilization-has-finally-gone-and-blown-itself-up movie, a deliberately not entertaining Mad Max or Water World. Let’s call it a grim, gritty flick stained stark and bleak with fear. But if you can hang in there long enough (not easy), there’s a meditation on love, too.

The Road, based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name, is not your standard issue post-apocalyptic revenge fantasy. There are no avenging angels come to settle the score with wayward humans, neither tight-lipped ones wearing shades like in Book of Eli or quirky, loose-lipped ones like in the Coen Brother’s No Country for Old Men. It’s too late for all that cosmic accounting, you'd best forget about salvation for the human race; we’re toast.

Viggo Mortensen stars as the Man, the father of a nine year old son (Kodi Smit-McPhee), the Boy. Both miss the Woman (Charlize Theron), wife and mother respectively, who mysteriously disappeared the night the sky turned the color of a blood orange and the world became ash shrouded and sunless, eerily and ubiquitously like Lower Manhattan the day after the World Trade Towers fell. Those few that survived are too stunned to ask why and too desperate to give in to despair.

Meaning may be dead, but life goes on. The movie chronicles the furtive, nomadic efforts of the Man and the Boy scrambling to survive. Their life consists of hunting for food all the time while guarding against being hunted by other people. The Man morphs into a trampoline of survivalist nerve endings, on high alert 24/7. He is quick to assume that a very old, gimpy man they encounter (Robert Duval) is going to kill them and steal their meager belongings. But the Boy begs his father to give the man some of their food, which he eventually does. And so it goes, the story of human history.

Pretty bleak stuff. The Man and the Boy are sustained by their affection for each other and the stubborn belief that the Woman is out there somewhere, waiting for them and not Godot. They aren’t much different than most of us, only most us of still have our creature comforts to keep us warm.