January 31, 2010: The Road
Viggo Mortensen does grizzled really well. The ladies think he’s pretty, but throw a ragged beard and some filth on him, and you’d never know that he’s one of the beautiful people.
The Road is a post-apocalyptic story of a man struggling for survival with his son after the disappearance of most of humanity and pretty much all of civilization. The back story of how this happened is touched upon during flashbacks but the specific cause of the disaster and the exact rate of decline into chaos are not really known. Mortensen was happily married with a pregnant wife when catastrophe struck (evidently some kind of natural disaster). They had the baby on their own and raised him for several years before the wife couldn’t take the struggle anymore and disappeared. This left Mortensen to head south with his son, hopefully to greener pastures. We meet up with them after several years on the road, living a paranoid existence with minimal food, and under constant threat from desperate and often violent gangs of other survivors.
The philosophical struggle seems to be the point of the film, and it handles this angle reasonably well. There’s the conflict between “having the fire inside you” – needing to press on regardless of the odds – versus giving up and committing suicide in order to escape a slow death, a quick death at someone else’s hands, or a hopeless life. Is it worth living when your life is guaranteed to be lived in constant fear and distrust of everyone else? Would Mortensen feel the same compulsion to go on if he didn’t have his son to provide a focus for his protective energies? If you hoard food and keep all you can find in order to survive and refuse to share anything with anyone else, do you remain one of the good guys, or are you contributing to the problem? What is really the point of it all?
The actual implementation of the story leaves something to be desired, though, and it’s hard to get past the distractions and come out on the positive side with this film. Technical issues such as muddled dialogue and some of the most hackneyed foley work (the sound effects added after the fact like doors latching and food crunching in people’s mouths) prevented me from immersing myself in the film’s world, though the cinematography is to be praised. The lack of explanation of the details of the disaster should be OK, but it leads to far too many distracting “what about this?” questions. It seems that plants can no longer grow and other animals are almost all gone, which is why everyone is so desperate for food, but what about bacteria inside the human bodies? Do they survive, and if so, can’t that lead to regeneration of life? What about travel – I wouldn’t imagine it would take more than a few years to walk to the US south from the northeast where they apparently started out, so I don’t know what they have been doing for all that time. It could be explained away but it isn’t. And Mortensen claims that there are only a handful of people left in the world, but how does he know about warmer climates, or other continents, unless world communications systems survived long enough to get the word out before the people were gone?
So we’ve got a fascinating concept to explore, and a decent amount of tension, but some logical fallacies bringing things down a notch. The Road is based on a Cormac McCarthy novel, the author behind the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men a couple of years ago, and perhaps the book would explain things better. This is worth seeing for what it makes you think about, but if you think too much, it might fall apart.
Philosophical journey marred by confusing reality.
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