AndrewBloom
CONTAINS SPOILERS9/10 5 years ago
[9.2/10] Bleak doesn't cut it. Grim doesn't cut it. Desolate doesn't cut it. *The Road* is a harrowing film. It is about the death of the planet, whether the world that’s left is worth living in, and whether God has abandoned his children. It contains frank discussions and tasteful but no less piercing discussions of suicide, cannibalism, and the desperate depths of human cruelty. It presents a place where hope has been ground out of the poor souls who linger, and trudging survival is all that’s left.
And yet, it never feels “grimdark”, harsh for the sake of harshness, or otherwise afflicted with a teenage view of maturity that says brutality makes something mature. Its darkness is not cool. Its pain is not glamorous. Its frank depiction of that raw desperation is not indulgent. Instead, *The Road* is committed to scraping the truth from its disquieting setting, and the glimmer human kindness and compassion beneath all that dust.
Boy, is there a lot of dust. So much of the mood that hangs over *The Road* comes from its direction, color-grading, and production design. The team assembled by director John Hillcoat conveys the unfathomable blight of Cormac McCarthy’s novel in a near-monochrome aesthetic. The spectre of death hangs over everything, in the cracked out suburban landscapes and the soot-ridden spaces in between.
The use of lighting to add dimension to this grisly world helps convey the starkness, with the mass of gray breaking up into solid forms amid the burnt out husks of humanity that surround them. You could watch this film on mute and still understand the mordant atmosphere that informs the quiet despair that hums in the background of the film. At the same time, Hillcoat and company frame eye-catching images to communicate the scope of the perils, internal and external, that the film’s characters are facing. A father and son sitting in an abandoned church with the outline of a cross overhead, or a shot that makes them look tiny in a landscape that looks like the surface of an asteroid, brings the themes of the piece into focus visually.
Those themes are unflinching, but also affecting. *The Road* is, in some ways, a film about theodicy, or put less fancily, about questions of how any just god could allow this sort of total decimation to happen. The Father, who’s our voiceover protagonist through this journey, describes his son as the voice of God, if God ever spoke.” He and his son offer an odd, sweet little lordless prayer at the film’s midpoint. The Father and old man debate whether the boy is an angel, and in their roundabout way, whether angels could exit in a world allowed to fall to such ruin.
Beyond those heavy questions that linger with the film, there’s a biblical sense to the whole thing, of a plague that ravaged the land, of Job-like trials, and of a spark of innocence born unto a world laid low with sin and desolation. The Boy represents that light of kindness and compassion, of “the good guys” who are mentioned so often, and the urge to be decent in an indecent world. The Father remarks that his son must think he came from another planet, with what he knows of a time and place The Boy never saw. But he passes down that “fire” that came from it, the last emblem of a world that fell but, as the last spot of hope in the film’s ending suggests, could be reborn.
That rebirth comes at a cost though. The heart of the film comes from the Father torn between two great pulls in his life. The first is the impulse to end it all, one founded on what he’s lost. The flashback scenes between The Father and his wife are haunting, both before and after the unspecified event that changed the state of affairs. The Father remains wounded by the loss of the woman he loved, by her choice not to beat back against the current, and at times he seems close to doing the same. But the equal and opposite pull comes from his son, and the desire to push on to see if there’s any life he could scratch out for this child he loves unbearably much. The Boy is literally what he lives for.
*The Road* plays in that space, between whether this Odyssian quest of hardships is worth it, or if the kinder, more humane thing to do would be to end it all. The film is frank, but not lurid, about how The Father wrestles with that decision. Viggo Mortensen is a well of unimaginable pain here, an open wound who’s barely hanging on, held together by the love of his son. His gripping, layered, achingly human performance here just makes *Green Book*’s reduction of his character to a cartoon goombah that much more of a sin. Mortenson does incredible work here, conveying a psychologically hobbled man’s great quest to soldier on for the good of the child he loves so deeply.
It is hard to watch him teach his son how to end his life with the small handgun that takes on almost mythic significance; it is scary in the tense moments when it seems they might have to use it, and it is utterly heartbreaking when this sweet child who’s seen so much but is still so unspoiled is forced to confront and contemplate the unspeakable threats and difficulties of this world and his desire to be rid of them by any means necessary.
And yet, the film is not a soulless parade of miseries and maladies. It would be too much to call it hopeful, but there is joy and the glimmer of warmer possibilities planted deep down below the gray muck and ashen trees. In brief moments, The Father and The Boy find comfort and relief. As painful as the film’s break points are, as tough as its contemplated possibilities become, there is something heartbreakingly endearing about the two of them. And while the film leaves things as ambiguous as the novel, it does offer a suggestion that, at a minimum, more is possible than kraven cruelty, even in the ashes of the world.
*The Road* earns that small measure of hope. It is hard to watch at times, and hard to stomach in others. Rarely does a view of the world, the options afforded to its inhabitants, this grim make it to celluloid in such frank terms. But that matter of factness makes the film as compelling as it is quiet and painful. Far from darkness as a selling point, the morose or debased made sparkling for our entertainment or ham-handed for a faux sense of adultness, *The Road* grapples with the black and gray of its world on an even keel. This makes the story -- of father and son, of life and death, of god and man -- realer and truer than other film’s faltering attempts to trace their names in the same suffocating dust, and earns its efforts to sweep it, and them, aside.
