The Road

Director: John Hillcoat

Year: 2009

The Road is the type of film I believe I’ll only see once. While I’m attracted to and have studied many films that have to do with great physical and mental pain – 127 Hours, Castaway and Silence of the Lambs come to mind – there are others, like The Road, that simply feel like too much. That’s not a criticism of the film. I appreciate the Director John Hillcoat’s craft and bravery to tell this story this way.

 It is a post-apocalyptic world with few clues about how it got that way. The Man (Viggo Mortensen’s character is never given a name) and the Woman (Charlize Theron) have a brief, picturesque life as husband and wife anticipating the birth of their first (and as it will be, only) child interrupted by what sounds like the destruction of the forest surrounding them. The forest, the fire and the darkness are just the beginning however. We are propelled some ten years later to find the Man now with a young Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee). It is a steel-sepia toned world, dead by all accounts. It feels like a nuclear winter. The Man and the Boy are on the Road south. They hope there is something better there. The world is stark. There are good people, mainly the Man and the Boy and bad people, noted for their cannibalism.

The Road has a similar feel to The Walking Dead, with cannibals instead of zombies. The mechanism Hillcoat employs, quite effectively, is the lack of information about the world we see. We never know the true nature of what happened and it doesn't matter. We are forced, with the Man and the Boy, into small, tight spaces. Danger and death can and do come from any at any time direction. 

The hard path the Man is left with by the Woman is whether or not to live at all. She chooses to leave the Man and the Boy and walk into the darkness. The Man chooses to live, fighting for the Boy’s life and the world he will inherit.

The bleak story reaches its low, for me, when the Man decides to show the Boy the proper way to kill himself – just in case. Equally matched in heart-sickness is a scene where the Man puts a gun to the Boy’s head, debating whether or not, as his wife suggested, it’s not more cruel to allow the Boy to live than to take his life and release him from this dead world. As this particular moral quandary is introduced early in the film, it is the inverse of Frank Darabont's "The Mist", in which he presented one of the all time downer endings. 

Mortensen gives his usual spectacular performance. Smit-McPhee does a wonderful job of staying toe to toe with Mortensen. His tender face and eyes plead with his father (and us) to retain humanity and hope. The biggest problem I have with The Road is now that I’ve seen it, I can’t unsee it – like the opening scene in Saving Private Ryan. I don’t begrudge the film or the filmmaker for what they’ve done. It’s a valid and very well made piece of art. It just hurts.

Resonance Rating 4.5 out of 5