In Theaters: The Road

And so the world Man and Boy trudge through, making their way to the coast for reasons that remain unexplained and make no sense on the terms the film sets up, is mostly male, highly tribal, and utterly godless, with the exception of son number one, of course. "He is an angel, to me he's a god," Man says, a remark in line with a number of similarly quasi-Christian incantations that never cohere into the one thing a human being would have left in a world without social, cultural, or religious structures: a convincing psychology. Instead, they just hang there, suspended in the plodding tones of Nick Cave's pump organ. Mortenson, face carved and scored to a Slavic essence, easily inhabits Man's bleak and often crazed determination, but the soul of the conflict between his ambivalence about humanity and his passion for his son -- a crucial element to a film with little dialogue and frustratingly intermittent narrative structure -- gets lost behind all that lovingly art directed grot.

Contributing to that barrier is Hillcoat's seeming indecision about whether to make a narrative film or a more experimental (and perhaps more crushing) ode to human extremity. The duo's guiding concern is about food -- finding it and not becoming it; prepared for suicide at any moment, the Man carries a gun with two bullets, lest they face a worse fate. Reduced to foraging animals, the most frightening thing the pair can come across on the road are not aliens or mutants or bombs but other human beings: "Whoever made humanity will find no humanity here," Man says, and as often as not he's a part of the dearth, refusing basic kindnesses to several strangers on the grounds of vicious self-preservation, behavior which devastates his son. The question only glancingly engaged and not even remotely resolved by the film is responsible for its lack of both a guiding philosophy and an emotional core: is there an inherent good not only in individual humans but in (continued) human existence? What are people without a planet, and what is the planet without people? Hillcoat crafts several memorable sequences around the perilous balance of human sanity and civilization as a learned condition: when the pair happen upon a bunker filled with food, the act of bathing and dressing to eat becomes a kind of sacred ritual, a return to dignity. Alternately, when they discover a beautifully appointed, intact house, it is this, the film's most civilized exterior, that conceals its most sensationally gruesome depiction of human depravity.

Ultimately, however, there's no clear argument for human endurance, which (leaving aside the laughably treacly finale, which I feel it is my duty as the enemy of cliché and focus testing to do) makes it hard to care about who survives and who doesn't. I left the film only a little disappointed about the world ending, although that's always a bit of a drag; what bothered me more was the film's contagious inertia, the emotional stasis that left me feeling -- half-assed child-savior hints notwithstanding -- like the whole lot of them would be better off dead.

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