MOVIE: The Road

Every once and a while a decent film slips through the cracks, going unknown to most of the movie-watching public. Earning positive reviews at several film festivals in 2008 and 2009, The Road, starring Viggo Mortensen as a father trying to survive with his son after something has turned Earth into a lifeless landscape, is worth checking out. Set in some near-future world filled with skeptical wanderers, scavengers, thieves, cannibals, and murderers, the father and son (we never know their names) traverse the cold dead and dying world looking for something, anything, to keep them alive.

Incredible computer graphic images of ruined cityscapes and roadways coupled with an almost constant sepia-toned coloration creates a feeling of unsettled fear and worry for the viewer. Appropriate, as the characters - good guys and bad - are constantly looking over their own shoulders, as no one can trust anyone. The film does a great job of contrasting the son's earnest innocence and unjaded kindness with the father's world-weary knowledge, protectiveness, and growing pessimism.

My favorite line happens when the traveling duo encounter an old man on the road to the coast. After much convincing from the son, the father offers him some of their food. While eating the old man confesses that when he saw the boy, he thought he had died and the boy was an angel. He then confides that, at times, he wondered if he was the last man on Earth. The father asks him how you would really know that. The old man responds, "I guess you wouldn't know it, you'd just be it."

Based on the 2006 novel, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, the film is both beautifully told and thought-provokingly tragic. A study in human nature and dealing with consequences, this is definitely not a "feel-good" film, but is a good one.

Sergio del Limónar