The Road by John Hillcoat
John Hillcoat’s 2009 The Road is a very atmospheric, visually powerful movie that doesn’t really have a story.
Of course, “road movies” as a genre quite often don’t have a story in the traditional sense, except that someone goes from one place to another. But if you look more closely, you can see that there’s a lot of storytelling involved, one way or the other. They’re either following the structure of epic journeys (like Homer’s Odyssey) and medieval quests (like Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival) to restore a balance in the world. Or they follow various forms of the Enlightenment-based Bildungsroman to achieve a balance of the mind (like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre or Twain’s Huckleberry Finn or, as one of my favorites, David Lynch’s 1990 Wild at Heart).
[Note: Here Be Spoilers.]And there you have it—or rather not. No character development at all occurs throughout the entire movie, throughout the entire journey. Several times, the father and the boy are at odds with each other over a defensive or retributive action the boy disapproves of, culminating in the boy’s questions whether they’re “still the good guys.” Whereby belonging to the “good guys” encompasses not wantonly killing people and, particularly, not eating people. Yes, this is the movie’s ethical scope in a nutshell. Of course, you don’t need character development for a story; many terrific stories revolve around challenges for the protagonist to stay true to herself or himself instead. But neither is this kind of fiction comfortably seated in the road movie genre, nor would it be applicable to the character of the father who doesn’t start out with the highest ethical standards to begin with. Nor would the “good guys” argument about not eating people suffice to sustain a two-hour movie.
What’s more, the premise feels somewhat contrived to get the action going. The unspecified cataclysmic event that had happened an equally unspecified number of years before torched the sky, killed all the animals, killed all plant life, and left the soil conveniently infertile to get the cannibalism thing going because, this is funny, way more humans miraculously survived than would be able to feed themselves by scavenging alone for more than a few weeks, let alone years.
Then there’s the psychological background. As it turns out, the mother’s decision to commit suicide seems to me, in hindsight, the only sensible decision made throughout the movie (and the only character I could actually relate to), since this brew of concocted premises renders every other course of action effectively moot. But the sociological background is even worse. Here, The Road fails big time: all the bad guys team up to launch their grisly human farming operations and terrorize the survivors, with a hearty appetite especially for tasty children, while all the “good guys” are “lone wolves” who even fight and kill each other. The latter is not what humans do. Our survival as a species, early on, very much depended on the evolved capacity to team up: not only to survive in a hostile environment, but also and especially to counter and prevent this kind of predatory intra-species behavior.
Add to that a cheesy ending with a dog. But the movie had nice pictures and a very doomish, post-nuclear atmosphere that made watching it worthwhile despite its many flaws.
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The Road, USA 2009.
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