Salina Art Center

Director John Hillcoat takes a brutal, nightmarish vision of Hell created in Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and fashions a dark parable for the post-9/11 bunker mentality, where every stranger is an enemy and existence has been distilled to the essence of “fight or flight.”  The post-apocalyptic world faithfully recreated by Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall is utterly realistic and mesmerizing in its desolation. It’s never explained exactly what happened to this near-future world: homes have been destroyed, buildings lie in ruins, crops have died, and society has been plunged into anarchy, lawlessness… and worse. Through this vivid landscape travel “The Man” (Viggo Mortensen) and his young son, “The Boy” (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Their performances are as authentic and unsparing as the harsh environment around them. Mortensen in particular is quietly effective, eschewing the movie star charisma that he’s shown in other heroic roles, most notably in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Here, he’s an Everyman, believable and appropriately scaled down to human size. Viewers recognize that his stoicism and dogged determination are all that remain of a human being whose emotions and capacity for feeling have been nearly burned away by tragedy, suffering, and starvation. He’s what any of us could become in such an environment—and that’s just one of the difficult truths brought home in this tough, unsentimental drama which examines—like William Golding did more than 50 years ago in Lord of the Flies—just what happens to our “humanity” when it’s tested in the crucible of deprivation and societal collapse. The film, like the novel, follows The Man and The Boy on a journey to the ocean; the purpose of this journey is perhaps more intuitive than rational: haven’t human beings throughout history tended to journey toward the ocean, because it represents life, safety, the possibility of escape—or rescue?  Like McCarthy’s bestselling novel, the film doesn’t hold out any false hope or happy endings. Yet there is a ray of hope: it lies in the bond between the father and son, specifically the father’s devotion to saving his child, and though this connection isn’t sentimentalized or even overtly stated, it represents the reason human beings are worth saving. In McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, the Texas sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones represented “light” in contrast to Anton Chigurr’s remorseless “dark.”  Sheriff Ed Bell was a decent man, still upholding the values of kindness, sympathy, caring, and forgiveness. “The Man” is not as warm, dryly humorous, or avuncular as Ed Bell, but in The Road he fulfills the same function, giving audiences a reason to believe humankind might be redeemed. Is The Road a depressing film, as some viewers suggest?  One of film critic Roger Ebert’s favorite statements is that a great film is never depressing—only bad ones are. Subject matter might be “dark” but when the material is treated with genuine artistry and feeling, the film lover’s only reasonable response is joy, not gloom. Movies can explore the darkest places of the human soul, and when it’s done with a spirit of illumination rather than exploitation, the viewer walks out of the theater enriched, challenged, and curiously energized. The Road is one of those types of experiences. It’s emotionally powerful, never manipulative, and takes moviegoers to a place that’s a little difficult but worth the journey. McCarthy’s magnificently stripped-down prose perfectly mirrored the bleakness of a ruined world through which The Man and The Boy faced psychotic, cannibalistic survivalists—material often found in science fiction adventure stories, but given remarkable weight and sobering matter-of-factness in the novel. Hillcoat, who directed the equally dark cult Western The Proposition, translates this tone to the screen through minimal dialogue, stark imagery, and the expert use of light and shadow, to create a ruined America that seems realistically lived-in. The Road is not escapist fare, but it’s an unforgettable look into the “heart of darkness” and one of the most unfairly neglected films of 2009.