Jordi Montaner | 10 may 2010
Title: The Road
Year: 2009
Duration: 111 minutes
Director: John Hillcoat
Screenplay: Joe Penhall (adapted from the novel by Cormac McCarthy)
Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, Charlize Theron, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Molly Parker
Music: Nick Cave and Warren Ellis
Photography: Javier Aguirresarobe
Editing: Jon Gregory
Art Director: Gershon Ginsburg
Producer: Marc Butan, Mark Cuban, Paula Mae Schwartz, Steve Schwartz, Rud Simmons, Erik Hodge, Todd Wagner and Nick Wechsler
Carlos Montes, Professor of Ecology at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) uses this movie and the book it is based on as talismans to explain climate change to his students. What a task. The dissection of your favorite pet in the university laboratory seems to be unbearably cruel. The film is harsh, unsettling and disturbing. The book it is based on is devastating. Since the film is no longer on in cinemas, you will have to catch it on DVD. But in any case, it is highly recommended to have gone through the experience of the Pulitzer-prize novel, translated into numerous languages, before taking in the film version.
The movie is an anguishing, apocalyptic road trip, torturous not for the adventures of the main characters (as in Mad Max’s Australian saga), but for the devastating conclusions that emerge in any analysis of the story.
On a planet that is all too recognizable, things have gotten so bad they have arrived to the point of not being able to get any worse: systems succumb; all energy sources are depleted; water becomes undrinkable; money loses all meaning, just like the concepts of law and order. Diseases have beaten all cures, and misery is the new norm. People die, or, more often than not, have already been counted among the victims. Those who survive may do so only by eating that which has died or been abandoned. There is no future. As McCarthy points out, “later is now.” The two protagonists, a father and son surviving in an eternal winter dominated by a huge cloud of ash (volcanic reminiscences?) that does not stop thundering, showering them with rain or snow. The Earth's crust is depleted, as if swept clean by a vast blaze that only left mud, ash and grime. The water color is colored black, the atmosphere, gray.
It is a tragic and pessimistic work. The evocations of the past are certainly not those of a better time, but those of a time mortally wounded and doomed to end.
As Montes noted in a recent conference in Barcelona, ecological disasters are also human disasters in social and psychological terms. Father and son (both nameless) flee while looking to find an impossible South, supposedly less cold, gray or dangerous. Along the way, they must overcome dangers from other humans who are inexplicably still alive, living to kill and killing to live. The fascinating thing is the precision with which the author, screenwriter, actors and director humanize this scenario a nightmare, zombie world. The father has the child as if he were an epitaph but for which is willing to kill.
The old man called Ely (the only character that has a name, albeit a false one) cross the path of the two protagonists and the three form an almost biblical trinity. Life must be lived as a disease and the only truth is death, but the child, the child embodies innocence, “the inner fire” the other two will defend like a lost relic of an ancient faith in life. If a man kills the Earth, what stops man from killing himself?
”The Road” evokes the specter of large-scale devastation that lies in our collective imagination. The end of the world, however, is not something exceptional, a catastrophic moment. All clocks have stopped, nothing works. A shopping cart, a piece of plastic or blankets, a can of soda or a gun suddenly acquired a new, different meanings. The protagonists, like Robinson Crusoe, are forced to represent humanity in a dehumanized scenario, as a romantic gesture, as beautiful as it is useless. Their sweeping power to survive, however, becomes the essence of a lesson.
McCarthy, in the original novel, gives no clues as to why the world is in this state, but inevitably, when reading the book or when watching the DVD, Montes students feel a tingling awareness of a common environmental responsibility that has been betrayed. Instinctively, they turn off the light, make sure the kitchen tap is not leaking, and notice the shiver running up their spine as they smile with a hint of sadness. Is this what is really going on? Is this the end of the road? Seeing what is happening, reading the news on climate change, it is hard to tell them no.
