The Road

In Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, the world has all but stoppedturning. The Pulitzer Prize-winning story never explains the ecologicalcatastrophe that rapidly overwhelmed the Earth and destroyed civilization,wiping out the larger part of humanity well before the opening sentence. Thecause of this global holocaust was unclear to the unnamed protagonist, a fatherwhose only “warrant” is to preserve the life of his boy. To this end, they keepon the move, heading south toward the coast, probably hoping that the wintrydesolation will warm a little, that the sun will emerge from the unyieldinggloom, making the crops grow again and permitting life to continue into thenext generation.

The adaptation by director JohnHillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall hews close to McCarthy’s sparse, grimprose. Viggo Mortensen stars as the father, his chafed face half-covered by ascraggly beard, leading his boy by the hand through a world whose color haddimmed to gray. Some of the most horrific scenes from the novel are omitted,but the film retains many glimpses of bloody horror. In one poignant scene, theboy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) clutches his stuffed animal to his dirty parka whilegently touching one of the bodies they discover hanging from nooses in a barnalong the road. Apparently, the people who once lived there killed themselvesrather than endure the gnawing hunger and cold and the savagery of a societythat failed.

Mortensen plays the father as a manforced to borrow against resources of resiliency and stamina he never knew hepossessed. If he and his boy were the last people on Earth, the search for suchessentials as food and shoes amid a ruined human landscape of rust and rotwould be an easier matter. But they must compete with other frightenedrefugees, pushing shopping carts of tattered belongings down the road, andcontend with heavily armed gangs determined to survive the chaos by any means,including murder and cannibalism.

As the father insists to his son, theyare among “the good guys,” yet the slope between good and evil is as slipperywith gray ash as the dead apocalyptic terrain they must cross. The father isfaced with hard choices. Should they share their scarce food or allow an oldman (Robert Duvall) to starve? Should they rob a desperate man who had justrobbed them and leave him naked to die in the chill and fog?

As he tells his boy, thereare “not many good guys left,” adding that he must “keep carrying the fire, thefire inside you.” The survival of all that is good about humanity provides thesingle ray of hope in The Road. It’sone of the year’s best films.