I went to see The Road (2009) today.  I went to see it alone–a new experience for me that I’m now sure to repeat.  I found it liberating because I didn’t have to come up with an opinion to defend afterward; instead, I let it simmer while I watched another film at the Landmark theater (something only possible when alone).  I kept coming back to the scenes in the underground bunker with all of the food and the cellar stocked with starving people–food for cannibals.  It reminded me of Fallout 3, a video game that I had beaten a month ago.  And then pirates.

When I was six, I buried a LEGO piece in my carpet.  I was delighted by the fact that it was entirely hidden and only I knew its location.  I have always been obsessed with secrets, time capsules, and the ending of In the Mood for Love (2000), but only now do I notice how thoroughly this desire permeates humanity.

Take pirates, for example.  After the enemies are all killed and the treasure is buried, pirates rejoice the fact that no one will find their booty.  In the handful of pirate-themed stories I have read, no swashbuckler has ever pondered: “Why did we bury the treasure?  Why aren’t we spending the riches?”  We derive such pleasure from having a secret that the symbolic value of the secret far surpasses the physical value of the hidden object itself.

In Fallout 3, you are an escapee of the underground Vault 101.  You scour the post-apocalyptic landscape of Washington DC, finding small colonies and trading goods for weapons and food.  The map is a block-to-block copy of the capital, all the way down to the subway system, and items can be found everywhere.  As I reached the level cap at 20, I found myself at a loss as to what to do next.  I had already built most of the weapons (including a Rock-It launcher, a weapon capable of using random junk for ammunition, from dinner plates to teddy bears), I had more than my fill of food and water and stimpaks (health), and any new quest I completed would not reward me with perks or experience points.  I found myself in an underground colony of Ghouls I had just exterminated, emptying all of my “worldly” possessions into a metal box I had found behind a boulder.  Now, mostly naked, I returned to the surface and found myself completely satisfied.  I dropped a marker on the map and quit the game.

I haven’t been back in a month.  I hadn’t even thought about it until I saw Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee climb down into the abandoned underground bomb shelter full of food and water.  That was someone’s buried treasure.  Someone saw this coming and now they’re gone.  It was a physical remainder of someone’s actions, a sign of their existence–and perhaps the only way of achieving physical permanence in this world.  In The Road, the actions of men above-ground leave barrels full of charred human bones behind: here, underground, someone has created something good. When the father and son sit down to eat, they give thanks.  They give thanks for the food; they give thanks for the memory.

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.