Most of us need a happy ending or at least a resolution to a problem that allows us a choice in the matter. However, this film did not give us either.
The verve that Viggo Mortensen embodied as the Father of his son ( Kodi Smit McPhee) during a post-apocalyptic end-of-the-world destruction was un-namable but I will try. It asks you what moral and iron-clad grit comes out of losing his wife (Charlize Theron)and facing the wilds of man on a walk to somewhere, anywhere during a nuclear winter. The words heard as the Father narrates the perfect descriptives of Pulitzer Prize winning Cormac McCarthy's novel THE ROAD begins to break your heart before much is begun. "If only my heart were stone."
There is no gameness, no strategy, only a dauntless spirit to find food and shelter and a safe haven from those without conscience, who will dip into a place of abyss where no man wants to tread. You may ask, Where is the aliveness? Where is the purpose? Why write a book or film a movie about the destitution of war and its aftermath; an extinction of humanity?
Maybe you have to read the book first and let the author's words wash over you, poking into corners of the core of your being. "He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said, If he is not the word of God, God never spoke." He told the child, "I will not send you into the darkness alone."
So they walked the road along the same road that carried the vagrants, the thieves, the unconscious takers of life, the manic and the forlorn. The child said, "We're carrying the fire because we are the good guys."
The story brings to mind another book written by Octavia Butler before her untimely death, a woman of substance who wrote of the child who walked a road out of post destruction in the undetermined future, called PARABLE OF THE SOWER. Her faith and her diligence to bring a piece of God to her torturous journey and share with her road travelers was extraordinary.
In THE ROAD I was weary as the characters were, compassionate to the highest power and filled with war torn emotion that such a thing could be imagined; that man vs man could come to that nexus point. I settled for the one true message. That this portrayed the bare bones of what humankind feels with survival. How far does one go to survive? You watch those slip into an instinctual grasp for life without a glimmer of hope or renewal. In that survival few things were important: food, shelter, staying alive without armor, struggling with the innate need to be even-spirited in encounters with others, fighting against and weighing the balance of humanitarianism, feeling the importance of closeness and the expression of love, facing the hateful idea of suicide with a half-closed heart, accepting death and aloneness, letting grief fill all the empty spaces when memory floods.
These are the bare bones of our essence and for nothing else, this film forces the hand of looking at the inevitability of such a scourge.
