This is the tale of a man, woman and child. It’s bleak and, at times, it’s hard to watch. But the dystopian 2009 movie based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy is a fine parable for everyday life, especially now. As I watched this nearly two-hour movie, I was thoroughly involved. I thought of the masked children of the Lockdown, how they’ve been traumatized into submission. The Road’s adept at making you think about the hidden, inner child and the incalculable cost of childhood lived in daily terror.
I cared about the main characters, a father and a son. The best part of The Road is its capacity to let you experience action moment by moment, without getting ahead of yourself and trying to guess what’s going to happen. It’s not an assault on the senses. It’s not a dramatization so ordinary it feels like you’re watching pure naturalism. There’s a progression, there’s a point, there’s a resolution. When you get it, it’s quite moving. That it comes with what feels like the end of the world makes perfect sense.
For the actors, from Robert Duvall, Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron to Guy Pearce and the child actors, The Road affords an opportunity to showcase human action in basic conflict with nature, man and himself. All the elements are here: air, fire, water—lots of running water—and, crucially, the manmade, especially the family. From an inexplicable cataclysm which immediately plunges Theron as wife and mother into lifelessness in her eyes to the final frames of a woman in desperate love with life, children and the good for being good, The Road delivers a powerful lesson in what it takes to survive today’s ominously creeping tilt toward the nil.
The Road dramatizes what Ayn Rand described as “the cult of moral grayness.” A narrative even uses that last word; a signal that the world is ending and that everyone is giving up. Except for a boy. He’s the son. His parents brave whatever they can stand amid cannibalism (the movie’s not a horror film), suicide and desolation. As the world collapses around them—a scene of woods falling in tree after tree captures the horror of our time, like the symbolism of a fallen oak tree in Atlas Shrugged—parent and child persevere and look for life, amid manmade things such as metal cans of pop, safety in fossil fuel-based motor cars and a stuffed animal which is, tellingly, an elephant.
“Stay off the road,” someone forewarns when the time comes. And there The Road runs out in an expressive and poetic elegy to goodness. The Road is not a great film. It came and it went without much notice and, yet, years after it was released, it captures the decency, challenge and Herculean struggle to avoid becoming one of the pod people. Today, in a land poisoned by sameness, Lockdown and a zeal to obey (instead of defy), The Road represents the notion that you can save yourself if you steal away and find the good. And that, to paraphrase the shrugging Atlas, we never had to take what’s monstrous and atrocious seriously.