The Road (dir. John Hillcoat)
Ok, so this is an odd one, part book review, part cheeky flicks trip. It began as it usually does, Marsh and I at the Arts eating cheese and mushroom toasties and drinking beer. Quite possibly the best preparation I can imagine for a post-apocalyptic horror, or a mindless rom-com for that matter.
She won't admit it, but I probably dragged Marsh there. I had read the novel the weekend we were in Germany, more than just reading it, I had devoured every page of it, anti-socially often spending the entire evening with my nose in it. I hadn't intended to get so involved: this was just a substitute for the Philip Roth novel I was reading, the only reason it was temporarily ditched was due to the unfortunate presence of a swastika on the cover. I had picked up The Road as a suck-it-and-see, with a view to a proper future read through. After the first few pages I became involved in the story of Man and Boy on their journey to the coast. I didn't know what they would find there if they reached it, and I suspected the journey itself (planned on a freebie oil company map) was more of a distraction from their impending deaths from starvation, rather than any real physical or spiritual journey. What I liked and loathed in equal measure was the reluctance of McCarthy to detail the event that led to two people alone and cold on the road, scavenging husks of wheat from barns and cans from burned out supermarkets. Quite simply, something happened and now nothing is as it was. In the book the Man refers to cows as being extinct; in the film the Boy quibbles the phrase 'as the crow flies', as crows only exist in books.
There are two particularly distressing aspects of the story, dealt with differently in both book and film. The most graphic is the threat of cannibalism, perhaps best illustrated in both by the farm they accidentally stumble upon where terrified, mutilated people are kept in a larder by a gang of survivors: the film will spare you from much worse. There is constant reinforcement from the Man to the child that they are one of the 'good guys', the fact that one of the defining features of a good guy is that he doesn't eat people is a measure of how despairing the situation is. Equally upsetting but much more subtle is the recurring motif of murder-suicide. Charlize Theron, playing the Boy's mother, has a role that only exists in brief flashbacks within the novel. Pregnant when the cataclysmic event takes place, she disagrees fundamentally with the Man about how, and if life can go on in this new world. By the time we meet the characters they have only two bullets remaining in their handgun; we see them mime and rehearse a possible future murder-suicide, always with the knowledge that with everyone they encounter the need to defend themselves may leave them with an awful decision to make further down the line. There was a constant fear as I read the book that the Man would kill the Boy to stop someone else killing him, using the same, twisted logic that hamster mothers use.
The experience of reading the book is one of breathtaking compulsion. Despite the truly grotesque scenes throughout I was driven to read on, desperately hoping that there could be some kind of happy ending in this unwaveringly unhappy world. A feeling joins you on the journey, one that convinces you that there can never be a truly happy ending, even if the novel ends on a high note. This is because the book is the story of the road, and the motif of the road is always the journey through life, which inspite of the pleasing vignettes- the meal they eat in the bunker, the can of cola, the Boy's first bath- can only end with the main character defeated.
On the technical side, the movie was very well shot on great locations mostly in Pennsylvania, but with some of the more urban scenes shot on in Katrina ravaged New Orleans. The strength of the movie was in its realism, or perhaps its attempt to capture a real situation. CGI was largely spurned in favour of using disused mines and, in a memorable scene, the Abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike. Make-up too was excellent, rendering Tinseltown lovelies as mouldering down and outs. Mortensen, Theron and Duvall in particular shined; I found Kodi-Smit McPhee's portrayal the Boy as a little saccharin sweet for my liking.
I watched this film about a week after Up in the Air, another, but very different road movie. The motif of the road, which represents the metaphorical journey through life, is one that interests me in the way it changes through the different stages of life. Clooney's character in Up in the Air, Ryan Bingham, has very little in common with the Man apart from the fact that they both learn something about themselves and others on their journey. The reason for this is that Bingham is in the middle of his journey, in what a commentator on Shakespeare (his/her name escapes me) called the tragic phase. The critic believed that the early years of a character could be characterised by comedy, especially the joy of falling in love; the middle years are the times of jealousy, discomfort, dislocation and the tragic; finally, old age brings the prospect of resolution, reconciliation and forgiveness. This doesn't entirely fit with Shakespeare or the road motif: for every Rosalind and Van Wilder, we have a Juliet and the entire cast of The Rules of Attraction. You do get the feeling though that Bingham is in that transition phase where tough questions are being asked about his lifestyle; when we left him in the departures lounge at the end of the film, you thought that those questions aren't going to get any easier any time soon. The Man copes with problems of another kind: the differences between comedy and tragedy are very subtle flavours- how do you decide whether you've had a good day or a bad day after the end of the world? It's as unimaginable as defining good and bad by what, and who, they eat. So does this make The Road a Romance? Not quite, but it is about resolution, being in the wilderness, and the old giving way to the young; the preservation of hope and keeping the fire alive, which is probably the best ending we can hope for.
