The Road (2009)

As long-time readers of my blog may recall, I like to set October aside for movies that befit Halloween one way or another. Unfortunately, the first disc I received this month was unplayable, so I searched my streaming list and found it sparse on anything like horror. This looked like my best bet.

You'd guess from the bland title that it was a road trip feature, but it seems to me that no actual road gets much screen time. It's a post-apocalyptic drama, which can't help taking on facets of a thriller at times. Neither the movie nor the Cormac McCarthy book on which it's based specify the cause, but we see plenty of dead trees, few nonhuman animals, and no signs of future tech. The protagonists, an unnamed man (Viggo Mortensen) and his unnamed son (Kodi Smit-McPhee, who later starred in ParaNorman), make a trek southward to survive a winter without fuel. Along the way, they must beware other people, who are likely to rob them or do much, much worse....

OK, I'll tell you: There are gangs of cannibals about. We never see them eating, but we see their victims -- or what's left of their victims. Not quite as gross as I feared, but gross enough. And the gangs are not above doing nasty things to people before killing them.

While I didn't think much of Mad Max: Fury Road, I knew from Children of Men (2006) that I could enjoy stories set in post-apocalyptic dystopias -- and that movie didn't do nearly so good a job of conveying the reason for violence. The tricky part is that what looks like the end of the world tends to offer little chance of a truly happy ending, so the stakes feel low enough to threaten boredom. TR has the right idea by keeping the focus very small: just two regular people hanging on as best they can.

In a sense, the main conflict does not amount to man versus man so much as man versus self. The main man's flashbacks -- few of them to pre-apocalyptic times -- indicate that his wife (Charlize Theron in yet another dystopia) gave up on life and encouraged him to do the same. He toys with the idea of shooting himself and urges his son to do so if they should reach that level of desperation, as in getting cornered by a cannibal.

The difficulty lies in morals as well as morale. When the boy asked his father whether they would always be "the good guys," I got a sense of foreboding. He certainly does some things I wouldn't approve under normal circumstances, but I don't think he crosses the line into villainy. Judge for yourself if you watch.

I'm afraid the boy might come across as too innocent. It's one thing to question or deny the rightness of his father's actions; it's another to show no signs of temptation whatsoever. Smit-McPhee was 13 when the movie came out, and I realize they may have done the shooting a few years earlier, but I can't help thinking he acts younger than he really is, like maybe 5. Then again, I don't know for sure how I would have behaved if born into such dire straits. Anyway, I should give Smit-McPhee credit for sounding perfectly American (is it in Australian actors' blood to do that?).

Mortensen, meanwhile, did some good old-fashioned method acting. He fasted, ate bugs, and remained unkempt to the point that he got mistaken for a genuine homeless guy. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean I have to like his performance. In particular, I got tired of his monotone narration. It's appropriate enough for the context, but come on, man, make me care more!

The other point to mention is the coloration. Specifically, it's dominated by brown and gray. Only in unusually hopeful scenarios do we see as much vibrancy as in the everyday present.

This ultimately bittersweet effort works out to about average for the subgenre in my mind. I cared and admired, but the bleakness served mainly to make me feel better when it was all over, like waking from a nightmare that's more dismal than scary. The scarcity of details is a two-edged sword: Do you relish letting your imagination fill them in relatably, or does it keep you at an unwelcome distance? Your answer may help determine whether TR is for you.