Few movies are as relentlessly disturbing as John Hillcoat’s post-apocalyptic nightmare The Road. Cannibalism, barbarism, suicide, mass extinction of the human race, rape, infanticide … this is not material you usually leave your Thanksgiving dinner to go see.
But amid all the grisly nihilism and stomach-turning hopelessness is one of the most heart-warming, tender and significant relationships of the movies of 2009. We have a father and a son, and the love they share brightens a screen that starts (and ends) in a pitch-black turmoil so thick it seems to drip from the screen like sludgy ink.
The Road, an exquisitely accurate adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pultizer Prize-winning novel of the same name, stars Viggo Mortensen as a man with no name. He wanders the burning plains of a destroyed world with his young son, also nameless. The movie makes no attempt to explain the disaster, although nuclear war, famine and disease are likely culprits. Calamity is everywhere: Fires are sweeping through the countryside, all vegetation has stopped growing, electricity is long gone, cars are parked where they ran out of gas, most houses are tombs for their last owners, and roving bands of cannibals terrorize the few survivors.
In an early scene in the film the father and son look for food in a barn. Hanging from the rafters are the corpses of a family that could no longer bear the world. Notice the young boy: he doesn’t flinch at their decomposing bodies. The Boy, young and innocent, has grown up in this chaos and it does not shake him easily.
Man and Boy are instinctively traveling south to the ocean from what might be the Carolinas or Virginias. They scrounge for food where they can. A can of soda makes an unexpected treat. The road they’re traveling on is worn and overgrown, and occasionally they meet other travelers, who they regard with caution.
Because the only real plot point in The Road is getting to the ocean, the movie is very episodic in nature. It skips from event to event, like a highlight reel of Man and Boy’s travelogue. They wander the road from hamlet to hamlet, passing under collapsing overpasses and through burning forests dislodged from the topsoil by unnerving earthquakes. They meet Ely (Robert Duvall), an old man who blindly shuffles along the crumbling road. They are robbed by a harmless thief (Michael K. Williams). They find a bunker with stockpiled food. They bathe in a beautiful waterfall spitting grey water.
They cross paths with cannibals fairly often and the movie does not shy away from the reality of the horrific device — disemboweled torsos, amputated victims, discarded heads and bones — although it stops short of the book, which had a glimpse of a baby roasting on a spit. Was the film exaggerating the cannibalism? I’m not so sure. People will do most anything to stop the hunger pangs.
But not the Man and his son, who live by principle even if the world does not. And that is the point of The Road: In a world with no humanity, love and compassion can still exist. This movie teaches that goodness is inherited from good people. “Papa, we carry the fire, don’t we?” the Boy asks. “Yes, we carry the fire,” the Man responds warmly. The Boy was born into this madness and he was taught right and wrong by a father who was not obligated to teach such things. The Road is also about the goodness of children. The sparkle in their eyes. The innocence of their questions.
McCarthy, the reclusive author, has said in interviews recently that the dialogue in his book — dialogue that’s been brought over into the movie — was based on actual conversations he had with his own son, whom he dedicated the book to. Put into the context of his post-apocalyptic vision and it becomes heartbreaking. “Are we the good guys?” the Boy wonders. The film knows where our heartstrings are, but doesn’t strum them unnecessarily. It doesn’t pander to our sentimentality. It simply speaks, and we listen.
McCarthy should be proud of what Hillcoat (The Proposition) has accomplished with his version of The Road. The film understands the source material, even as it changes it (with the addition of a mother, Charlize Theron) and condenses it. And the producers must be applauded for keeping the film as dark and hopeless as the book, which is a brave declaration of the sanctity of McCarthy’s original work.
Really, though, what is this movie? It’s a movie for fathers and their sons. Very few movies speak so loudly and proudly about the powers of fathers. The day I saw The Road I had been helping my own father rewire electricity in his home, the home I grew up in. We had been working on it for more than a week, and we had bonded tremendously during those days of hard work. That time is priceless to me. I knew that before seeing The Road, but the film magnified it further.
Someone once said that parents raise children to replace them. It’s the truth. A good father only wants his child to grow up to be wiser and kinder than he is. And this father is no different with his son, be it the end of the world or no.
As if the world needed more skulking, brooding teens, here is an entire film of them doing nothing but staring into the abyss of each other’s eyes contemplating being together for the most miserable of eternities. Why they want to brave immortality together is beyond me, especially when they can’t muster a smile for more than about 5 minutes.
Even in the film’s opening moments — usually the parts of a movie full of happy pre-conflict characters — our hero is reciting Romeo & Juliet, and not the romantic verses either, but the suicide parts. Apparently, his soul is tortured, which is why he tortures the screen (and us) with his overplayed teen angst.
I’m going to just unload on New Moon starting right from the top since the core audience of the Twilight franchise doesn’t read this blog because it isn’t delivered as an iPhone app or a Twitter update. And because if they know better they’ll stay away from reviews, most of which are going to devour this petty, minuscule movie and its unnecessarily loud hype.
New Moon is a teen vampire movie set in the Pacific Northwest. It made me yearn for better teen movies, better vampire movies and a different story in the Pacific Northwest, a setting far too pretty for these gloomy teens. If you haven’t seen Twilight then there’s no real point in seeing New Moon, which assumes you know every scene from the first film and every word, comma and veiled nuance in Stephenie Meyer’s novels, including the endings to sequels that haven’t been filmed yet.
Apparently even the most average Twilight fans read the books multiple times so they can nod in agreement when the films ace the material, and then shake their fists when they get it all wrong. It’s as if the film isn’t a film, but an appendix to the book. Those same fans will say you have to read the books to enjoy the movies, but let me add this: you can skip the books and the movies so you can free up time in your schedule for charity work, organized sports or treehouses. (To be fair, the same can be said about Star Wars, Harry Potter or any other overhyped franchise.)
Bella (Kristen Stewart) is back and this time she wants to be a vampire. The pros are fashionable clothes, overpriced cars and eternal life with Edward (Robert Pattinson). The cons are twinkling ice-cold skin, pale complexion, chronic boredom and eternal life with Edward. Most women at the screening I attended would love to spend just half an hour with Edward (if it even takes that long for the little imp) even if there’s clearly not a single thought in that vampire brain of his. Honestly now, how long could you really talk about how much you loved each other? This is why Romeo and Juliet are both dead at the end of their story — they really had nothing better to talk about anyway.
Sensing Bella’s sudden vampire urge (a blatant sexual metaphor perhaps), Edward ditches her “for her own safety.” Taking advantage of Bella’s new single status is Jacob (pudgy faced Taylor Lautner), the local werewolf who reveals himself to be a werewolf about 90 minutes after the Twilight idiots (like myself) have figured it out for ourselves. The fact that he walked around in cut-off shorts and no shirt in Washington’s winter had something to do with it, though. And then after he’s revealed, cue a stream of horrific wolf/dog puns.
The acting is atrocious on nearly every level. Stewart, who I feel has some talent, is required to have bad dreams and stare into empty spaces like Edward's face, which barely counts as acting in a movie not made for girls with Hello Kitty! backpacks. Edward looks clueless in every scene, and Pattinson doesn't help him with the hazed-over wonderment in his moonface. All the best characters are given only brief parts, like Charley, Bella's dad, who says stupid fatherly things, but is generally a sane character if also a little clueless about his free-wheeling daughter. Vampire matriarch Carlisle (Peter Facinelli) is the most interesting of the vampires, if only because he's not 17 years old, yet all he does is stitch an arm then fade into the background. Bella's friend Jessica has a terrific little monologue about zombies and clichés that's so poignant it could be a commentary on the film itself. Jessica's played by Anna Kendrick, the star of one of my favorite movies about teens, Rocket Science. She also keeps up with George Clooney in December's superb Up in the Air. See either of those movies and you'll be better using your time.
I’ve explained some of the plot, but I’m not doing the film justice. What is it about? It’s about Bella waiting for Edward to return. That’s it. She toys with Jacob’s feelings, but he clearly never has a shot, the poor wolf-guy, because Edward is destined to return or Bella will just whither from his absence. The film states all this again and again in tortured sequences of dialogue that will test your patience and the strength of your armrest as you claw at it mercilessly. In terms of content, the vacuum of space feels like a conga line compared to the chilly and unpleasant conversations these characters share during many of New Moon’s 130 minutes.
All this weepy drama can’t be good for women, especially young girls, who are brainwashed by opera this soapy. I hate it when a movie makes me feel like a feminist, but this is one of them. Consider: Bella is defined by the men she’s dating. She’s worthless when Edward’s not around. When he disappears she acts suicidal in hopes that he’ll return and pity her. She’s always in need of rescuing. Watch this movie and you’re being told that women are stupid and meaningless until a man completes them. I expect this from a misogynist like Tucker Max, not a woman. And why does a man have to draw attention to this?
If it hates women or loves them, all I ask is that something happens. New Moon just pretends to have things happening: vampires lunge at open wounds, shirtless boys transform into overgrown wolves, stand-offs and chases in the woods, and Italian castles with a vampire tribunal (in which Dakota Fanning has one line, “Pain”). Break all that down, though, and you still only have a frozen tundra of uncomfortable silences, impassioned gazes and lifted eyebrows all directed at Bella, who’s so self-centered that maybe immortality as a narcissist vampire is an appropriate career path.
Obviously, I hated this movie, but — and this has to be said — Twilight fans will love it. They’ll see Bella and Edward’s bland conversations as modern-day Shakespeare, and all the weepy, detached romance as eternal true love. They’ll eat it up in multiple viewings and then write me to say I’m a cranky old man who doesn’t understand anything. Well, here’s one thing I do understand: skulking, brooding teens are no fun to watch. In real life, or in a movie.
Smile already.
Few movies are as relentlessly disturbing as John Hillcoat’s post-apocalyptic nightmare The Road. Cannibalism, barbarism, suicide, mass extinction of the human race, rape, infanticide … this is not material you usually leave your Thanksgiving dinner to go see. 
The Road, an exquisitely accurate adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pultizer Prize-winning novel of the same name, stars Viggo Mortensen as a man with no name. He wanders the burning plains of a destroyed world with his young son, also nameless. The movie makes no attempt to explain the disaster, although nuclear war, famine and disease are likely culprits. Calamity is everywhere: Fires are sweeping through the countryside, all vegetation has stopped growing, electricity is long gone, cars are parked where they ran out of gas, most houses are tombs for their last owners, and roving bands of cannibals terrorize the few survivors. 
Man and Boy are instinctively traveling south to the ocean from what might be the Carolinas or Virginias. They scrounge for food where they can. A can of soda makes an unexpected treat. The road they’re traveling on is worn and overgrown, and occasionally they meet other travelers, who they regard with caution. 
They cross paths with cannibals fairly often and the movie does not shy away from the reality of the horrific device — disemboweled torsos, amputated victims, discarded heads and bones — although it stops short of the book, which had a glimpse of a baby roasting on a spit. Was the film exaggerating the cannibalism? I’m not so sure. People will do most anything to stop the hunger pangs. 
But not the Man and his son, who live by principle even if the world does not. And that is the point of The Road: In a world with no humanity, love and compassion can still exist. This movie teaches that goodness is inherited from good people. “Papa, we carry the fire, don’t we?” the Boy asks. “Yes, we carry the fire,” the Man responds warmly. The Boy was born into this madness and he was taught right and wrong by a father who was not obligated to teach such things. The Road is also about the goodness of children. The sparkle in their eyes. The innocence of their questions. 
McCarthy, the reclusive author, has said in interviews recently that the dialogue in his book — dialogue that’s been brought over into the movie — was based on actual conversations he had with his own son, whom he dedicated the book to. Put into the context of his post-apocalyptic vision and it becomes heartbreaking. “Are we the good guys?” the Boy wonders. The film knows where our heartstrings are, but doesn’t strum them unnecessarily. It doesn’t pander to our sentimentality. It simply speaks, and we listen. 
McCarthy should be proud of what Hillcoat (The Proposition) has accomplished with his version of The Road. The film understands the source material, even as it changes it (with the addition of a mother, Charlize Theron) and condenses it. And the producers must be applauded for keeping the film as dark and hopeless as the book, which is a brave declaration of the sanctity of McCarthy’s original work. 
Really, though, what is this movie? It’s a movie for fathers and their sons. Very few movies speak so loudly and proudly about the powers of fathers. The day I saw The Road I had been helping my own father rewire electricity in his home, the home I grew up in. We had been working on it for more than a week, and we had bonded tremendously during those days of hard work. That time is priceless to me. I knew that before seeing The Road, but the film magnified it further. 
