Movie Review: The Road

LITTLE ROCK — In the beginning there was darkness. A rectangle of black, stirred by shadows. A gray horizon, maybe.

Then came the red fuse. A blaze far off and smoky. A sooty film to cover the pair, the man and the boy staring.

Now walking. The man’s voice is even, lowered, modulated. Like he did radio in the Before. The boy is all soft whimper restrained by habit, testing the limits of paternal wisdom, the last glory left an ashchilled world.

They walk and push. Against the encroachments of night. And hunger that tightens like a mainspring in their sucked-in guts. Are we there yet? No, son, and we will never be. Don’t worry, there are two bullets left.

There was Before, a sky and a lawn that needed cutting. Flowers that burst up from the green ground. A horse to nuzzle. Trees that didn’t crackle and drag like Sylvia Plath’s blacks. A house with beds. And her, Charlize Theron, briefly at the piano tinkling.

Notes there are no more. The only music the splitting sigh, deathrattle of the blasted earth. All is broken teeth and ruined rheumy creatures with dead eyes like Robert Duvall.

Still, poles there are of bad and good. And moral opportunity exists even in the dark, though it’s perhaps as rare as the last can of Coca-Cola. (Or the talismanic Twinkies sought by Tallahassee in Zombieland.) Sometimes there’s only the next step, the next breath.

At least there are no flies. Not like the Outback Western in the Before, that John Hillcoat made. The Proposition, with Guy Pearce gaunt and sweaty. Not that now. Now Viggo, homeless dirty walking man with simple poetry in his mouth. The boy’s Australiannow, and Pearce appears but briefly.

Honest in its slouching way, The Road takes step after step and breath after breath. It literalizes but doesn’t flinch. It is brave in the dumb way brutes sometimes seem to be, as though it knows no alternative. It knows no humor except that which it doesn’t perceive, the grim joke it sometimes makes of itself with its relentless slog toward nothing but the barest hint of something better. It is honest, for it lacks the wit to lie.

Cormac McCarthy, author of the book, may shake his head at this. The wrongly beloved Oprah selection survives; it will not be consumed by Hollywood, it is granite mountain in a forest fire. Trying hard means nothing, there is what is and what isn’t. The Road isn’t bad. All we could have hoped.