The Road

Clearly the winner for one of the most utterly miserable films of all time, The Road is bleak from the start. Everything is grey and dreary as an unnamed man (Viggo Mortensen) teaches his son (Kody Smit-McPhee) how to end it all when it the world gets too much. The boy's terrible mother merrily wandered off into the dark to die without a second thought her son, who she wants to kill anyway. In short, this film isn't a barrel of laughs.

Just like your traditional road movie, but with cannibals.

Based on Cormac McCarthy's book of the same name, one wonders what drove him to write something quite as bleak as this. But instead of wallowing in the misery of it all, there are some important issues raised. When survival is this difficult, what's the drive to carry on living? The answer seems to be to protect the ones we love, but even this doesn't seem sufficient, the two protagonists need to dream up some abstract fantasy about The Coast to keep plodding on.

We can see McCarthy's view of humanity isn't exactly complimentary, humans have either topped themselves, reverted to cannibalism or are refugees which see death as a luxury. Even the heroes of the piece are not shining examples of morality. The unnamed man happily declares that "we're the good guys" as he murders two people, leaves an old man to die instead of letting him share their food and leaves another helpless and naked. Is this what carrying the fire of humanity's about? One wonders about the pyschological impact on the child.

My main criticism of this film is that a lot of people die and we're not encouraged to care about them. We're casually given fleeting glimpses of atrocities (mainly involving hungry cannibals) and the message this seems to be sending is that in the end nobody really matters (hence why no one's allowed a name). So as the viewer trudges through the sludge of human nastiness he/she will remain dry eyed until the final scenes.

In fact the most touching element of the film is the father's love for his son. "If he isn't the voice of God, then God never spoke," growls our hero. Despite his brutal treatment of others and his poor personal hygiene, you will eventually be won over by our gruff protagonist and his utterly devoted son.

Rating:6/10