Growing Up at the End of Humanity
by Giampaolo Bianconi
The Road, dir. John Hillcoat (2009)
One of the most harrowing moments in The Road comes early, when the boy’s father (Viggo Mortensen) reminds him how to kill himself: put the gun in your mouth, aim upwards, and pull the trigger. When the time comes you’re gonna have to do it just like everybody else. The moment perfectly encapsulates the film’s unpretentious bleakess. I must seem to you like I’m from another world, the father tells his son. Mortensen’s pale, emaciated body carries encyclopedic knowledge of a world that has passed to ruins—when he dies, it will die also, making room for the innocence of the child (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and his overwhelming humanity. It’s something, we’re reminded at the end of the film, the father may have been close to forgetting.
Where the book indicated how stilted relationships would be after the end of civilization—arguing with sodomizing road agents and escaping the gaze of cannibalistic southern gentry isn’t quite like running into your neighbors at the supermarket–the film manages to convey the awkward normalcy of these exchanges, their frigidity and gray hopelessness as much as their brief glimmers of optimism. What makes The Road so remarkable is its unwillingness to let its visual representations–which, as concrete images, can in a sense never be abstractions–interfere with necessary narrative ambiguities.
I was worried about the inclusion of flashbacks involving Charlize Theron as Mortensen’s wife. My fear was that such glimpses of “the world before” would replace central ambiguities with trite generalizations. Yet the flashbacks were unobtrusive, verging on shifty memory or even dreamlike fantasy. Furthermore, by choosing to set certain fantasies in a past that is not just their past (today) but also our past (the late 60s or early 70s), Hillcoat merges our nostalgia with their nostalgia, making the serenity of the past seem much more earnest.
Hillcoat’s camera is patient and curious. He makes use of wide, static shots that convey the strange beauty of an ashen, alien landscape, only a shadow of the earth we inhabit. During a scene with an elderly blind wanderer (Robert Duvall), Hillcoat lets the fire dance off the actors’ faces before cutting ominously yet subtly to the father’s pistol. I knew this was coming, says the old man. There were signs. Entrusted to a less talented actor this line could have sunk the film, mired it in unremarkable ecological moralisms. Yet with Duvall, it is suggestive without overplaying its hand—much like the film itself.