THE ROAD (2009)

Posted by Stephen Jannise

My journey toward really loving this movie spanned two screenings, and I can talk a bit about both of them here. I first saw The Road at the 2009 Austin Film Festival, and it was easily the film I was anticipating the most. Director John Hillcoat’s previous film, The Proposition, was not only my favorite movie of 2005 but instantly took its place among my very favorite Western films. That film had been written and scored by the musician Nick Cave, who was back with Hillcoat to score The Road. You probably already know that The Road has been adapted from a novel by Cormac McCarthy, whose writing also inspired another of the decade’s masterpieces, No Country for Old Men. And it stars Viggo Mortensen, who has proven himself to be a very fine actor in two films from director David Cronenberg, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. With all these elements in place from so many films that I’ve adored, how could I not immediately fall for The Road?

I certainly did fall for it, and, after seeing it at the festival, I saw the film again with my parents. Their reactions revealed to me the real strengths of this film. It’s a film that contains a number of horrifying images, events, and characters. Taking place in an ashen, post-apocalyptic landscape, Mortensen’s father character and the son, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, are trying to make their way to the coast through a seemingly never-ending assortment of robbers, murderers, and cannibals. However, as frightening as these scenes are, they are merely there to illuminate what is the father’s ultimate fear: that he will die before he is able to provide the son with whatever he needs to distinguish right from wrong, to be a good judge of character, and, most importantly, to survive. Thus, the film essentially suggests that, even in a wasteland filled with cannibals, the priorities of a parent remain the same, and the scenes in which Mortensen desperately tries to assure the boy that they are still the good guys, that they will never resort to cannibalism or murder, and that his sole remaining purpose in life is to protect the boy from harm had the greatest affect not only on my parents but on everyone in the room.

One of the film's 'sappy' father-son moments.

Nick Cave once again provides a beautiful score, even if it does contribute to the film’s occasional descent into sentimentalism. In the end, though, I can’t say I hold the film’s sentimentalism against it. Whereas many dramatic films break up tension with comic relief, this one simply chooses a different emotion to solve that narrative problem. After long sequences of gruesome violence and threats to the father and son’s lives, the filmmakers simply cue an emotional crescendo in the score and toss in some tearjerker dialogue, allowing the audience to experience a more welcome feeling of basic sadness before a return to brutality. A.O. Scott of The New York Times disagrees, arguing that the film is “insufficiently bleak” and that “despair has to be given its due.” Well, I can imagine the film made this way, and it’s a film I wouldn’t want to see again. As for the film we have been given, I feel it is a movie well worth seeing multiple times. See it with your parents if you want to realize their greatest fears, and should you have children of your own some day, see it again to realize your own.