The Road - % % % % %

I have not seen such an engrossing and encompassing film in many months. Something about the intensity of the genre demands the audience's attention, and yet this film was more penetrating in its sparseness and more emotional in its anonymous performances, making none its equal.

Marvelous. It is a miserable story. At its core is the essence of why we live. In creating a truly desolate world, the story from the novel "The Road", by Cormac McCarthy, strips away the other concerns in life that we are cluttered with living in modernity. This leaves the hunt for food, the fear of danger and violence and then the radical question, why live at all?

After an unknown apocalypse of such extreme proportions that all life aside from human has ceased, a father and son head south. Flashbacks expand on their situation, telling the backstory of a wife and mother, Charlize Theron, who finally gives up so completely and, spoiler alert, removes her layers of warm clothing to walk into the dark and cold wild. Alone with the boy, the man, masterfully played by Viggo Mortensen, trudges along fighting to get the boy to an age when he can survive on his own or prepare himself for the likelihood of merciful suicide. The film deftly allows in the most gruesome of realities without reveling in their monstrous power. Many of the surviving people have taken to cannibalism since all of the animals and plants are dead. The horrors of this environment are acknowledged and momentarily explored to establish the extreme danger for the pair, but are not embraced with prurient thrill as is often the case in the apocalyptic genre. The film is filled with fear and allows horror, but is more elegant than a more base thrill or shock. Rather, it holds the suspense of morality at its core. Is this the right decision? Can I live with this choice? What will be the consequence of my decision? And the suspense of these moments does not fade in the resolution of the events because the mind holds the tension of such moments long after they have passed.

This is a story written with a masterful understanding of the human condition at its essence. It is brilliant.

The film is dominated by gray and dirty landscapes of dead trees and decayed society. Interspersed with poignant close ups of hands clutching at tenderness and tears trickling down worn cheeks, the story keeps the man and his son at the center. They don't have names. They are unnecessary in this world since other people are a danger, and everything unnecessary has been stripped away. There are moments of joy interspersed accidentally in their journey. A swim under a waterfall. A discovered can of coke. The embroidered couch cushion with blue flowers in his parents' living room. Some elements of modern life that we occupy ourselves with remain in this wasteland.

The performances are universally real and compelling. I can't imagine how a director was able to elicit such a performance of raw fear, vulnerability and justice from a child. Extraordinary. The scenes involving strangers like Robert Duvall, Guy Pierce and the underused Michael K. Williams
(c'mon and hire this man more, people! He is Omar from the wire and the most extraordinary actor from the whole series! That man needs a better agent!) are filled with fear, curiosity and tenderness. They allow the film to breathe, filling moments with the real grace of life, human connection. And that is what leads to the unexpected happiness of the ending. It seems unimaginable until it finally happens and is in parallel with sparse, barren nature of the film. This visual metaphor, the boy and the man alone in a barren world illuminates the core of the story. Human connection is the reason for life. It's the reason to go on. It is what love is. It is what life is. I am astonished by the profundity elicited by this film and moved by how effective it is in pervading an audience with its story and themes. Magnificent. Magnificent.

Director John Hillcoat's previous film "The Proposition" takes another raw genre centered around survival and the human condition, the Western, and offers a bleak and cruel perspective as well, but not to the same effect. In The Proposition, familial loyalty is tested and the situations never create enough tension to mentally shake the audience into philosophical crisis in the same way that he manages to in The Road. And he's Canadian. I didn't think it possible for a country with a functioning NHS and little poverty to speak of to produce such a morose dude, but I guess those long winters can put one in touch with the power of bleakness. Really a fantastic movie. Brilliant.